Ouch!
San Antonio residents spent whopping $26.8 billion on rent in the past decade
When it comes to total rent paid this decade, San Antonians are better off than renters in other major Texas metros, a new analysis shows.
From 2010 through 2019, renters in the San Antonio area spent $26.8 billion for their living quarters, according to a report released December 11 by real estate website Zillow. To put that in perspective, it's roughly equivalent to the size of Cambodia's economy.
The total sum of rent paid by San Antonians jumped 47.8 percent from 2009 to 2019, a smaller overall jump than what was seen in Austin, DFW, and Houston. This year, San Antonio renters paid $2.9 billion, down 0.4 percent from 2018, Zillow says. Currently, the median rent is $1,225 per month, up 0.1 percent from a year ago.
And there might be more relief in sight.
“With rental appreciation expected to decrease in the coming year and a homeownership rate that has been ticking up over the past few years, a small or even negative change in total rental spending could be in the cards in the early 2020s,” Zillow economist Joshua Clark says in a release.
Elsewhere in Texas, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston weren’t immune to the costly leap, the Zillow analysis shows.
The total sum of rent paid by Austinites jumped 92.6 percent from 2009 to 2019. That’s the highest increase among all the major metro areas included in the Zillow analysis. (Raleigh, North Carolina, was second with a 91 percent increase.)
From 2010 through 2019, renters in the Austin area spent $36.7 billion for their living quarters, about the size of the economy of Latvia, a small country in northern Europe.
In DFW, the rent total shot up 83.7 percent over a 10-year span, landing at $104.2 billion in 2019, Zillow says. By comparison, the size of the Puerto Rican economy is nearly $100 billion. This year alone, DFW renters forked over $13.2 billion, up 3.2 percent from 2018, according to Zillow.
As for the Houston area, the entire bill for rent came to $90.4 billion from 2010 through 2019, adding up to a 10-year spike of 65.8 percent, the analysis indicates. That total is close to the size of the economy in the Dominican Republic. In 2019, Houston renters coughed up $10.8 billion, representing a 1.7 percent increase compared with last year, Zillow says.
