Bay Area residents may feel that everything is becoming more expensive, all the time. But one thing that is not more expensive this year, surprisingly, is rent.

Year-over-year dip

Apartment rental sites are rolling out their year-end reports. And the big news is that San Francisco rents went down in 2019.

Rental listing site Zumper is reporting that San Francisco, while still the priciest place to rent in the United States, has seen the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city proper drop 1.1% to $3,490, while two bedrooms fell 3.6% to $4,500 this November.

Oakland also experienced a dip in rents: Zumper calculates that one-bedroom rent in Oakland dropped 1.2 percent year-over-year to $2,470. Two-bedroom rent decreased 0.3 percent to $2,990.

Even San Jose felt the pinch. Zumper's figures show San Jose — while still the 5th-most expensive rental market in the country — posting rents that stayed flat at $2,450 for a one-bedroom, while two-bedrooms fetched $2,900, down 1.7 percent from 2018.

Olyvia Ruhlmann of Apartment List.com also pointed to the novel trend of S.F. rents on the decline.

"This past month , San Francisco rents declined 0.7 percent and have remained relatively flat at 0.2 percent growth year-over-year. November marks the 3rd-straight month the city has seen a decrease after a seasonal spike in June-August," Ruhlmann told SFGATE. Apartment List data show that overall, the city of San Francisco's year-over-year rent growth of 0.2 percent trails behind the California state average of 1.1 percent, as well as the national average of 1.4 percent. In contrast to San Francisco, other Bay Area cities have experienced rent growth this year: "Rents have risen in eight of the largest 10 cities in the San Francisco metro for which we have data," said Ruhlmann. "Richmond has seen the fastest growth in the metro at 5.2 percent." Apartment List data posit that the current median rent in San Francisco is $2,468 for a one-bedroom apartment and $3,101 for a two-bedroom. According to the Aparmtent List Rent Report for the San Francisco metro, San Mateo has the most expensive rent with a two-bedroom median of $4,436, while Oakland has the least expensive rent, with a two-bedroom median of $2,227. Oakland is also the city with biggest decline in the metro month over month, dropping 1.4 percent this November. Why the differing figures? Apartment List numbers differ from Zumper as the data are collected differently. Apartment List uses median rent statistics from the Census Bureau, "then extrapolate them forward to the current month using a growth rate calculated from our listing data.....similar to Case-Shiller’s approach, comparing only units that are available across both time periods to provide an accurate picture of rent growth in cities across the country.....producing results that are much closer to statistics published by the Census Bureau and HUD," says Apartment List.

Zumper uses "aggregate data from over one million active listings to calculate median asking rents for the top 100 cities by population and nearly 300 additional cities within major metro areas." This includes new construction and excludes listings no longer available/rented.

Both claim to offer the most accurate picture of the current rental market.

Irrespective of whose calculations are indeed the most accurate, the fact that Bay Area rents are down year-over-year in many major cities is inarguable, and it sets a different tone in the nation's most expensive rental market going into 2020.