A new apartment survey shows Bakersfield rent prices climbed still higher during the last three months despite a slight uptick in what remain historically low vacancies.
The quarterly summary by local multifamily housing specialist Marc Thurston reported the city’s overall vacancy rate rose from 1.35 percent in the third quarter — a low unseen in recent years — to 1.72 percent, which he asserted is “still remarkable given the market challenges for 2020.”
Meanwhile, prices for new rents (not necessarily those paid by existing tenants) rose during the fourth quarter between 1.7 percent and 2.3 percent, depending on the area, Thurston noted.
Year-over-year comparisons are where the impact becomes clear. Thurston’s report says that since the fourth quarter of 2019, rents for a three-bedroom apartment in Bakersfield are up more than 12 percent, with asking prices for two-bedrooms up only a little less.
One-bedroom rents were up 7 percent year over year, Thurston’s survey summary found, and studio rents rose 5¼ percent.
Vacancies in one-bedroom apartments were nowhere to be found in the city’s north, northwest, south and east, according to Thurston, while in the eastern part of southwest Bakersfield vacancies of those type of units stood at 3.4 percent, and 1 percent further west. He reported vacancies totaled less than 1 percent in the city’s northeast.
A separate survey released last week by small-business research website AdvisorSmith presented different figures for Bakersfield rent increases in 2020 and, unlike Thurston’s report, put them in national context.
AdvisorSmith said Bakersfield rents rose a little more than 10 percent since the start of January, which it said was 20 times the national average. It reported Bakersfield’s increase ranked 12th among cities nationwide.
Bakersfield residential developer Austin Smith, a principal at Sage Equities, said the city’s market-rate rents downtown have remained surprisingly strong during the pandemic.
“Demand has stayed high and actually grown throughout 2020, despite a market-altering global health crisis,” Smith said by email.
The city as a whole has become a stronger market during the past year as existing trends have accelerated, Smith wrote. He noted demand has grown for his company’s projects downtown.
“A bulk of our residents work in the health-care field and other non-cyclical professional fields. We have a growing waitlist for prospective tenants — it is a healthy length of a couple dozen individuals and families at all times,” he wrote.
He added that the company wishes it could build new apartment communities “fast enough to keep up with this growing demand.”
Follow John Cox on Twitter: @TheThirdGraf
