For the fourth consecutive month, rents have fallen around the Bay Area.

That’s according to a new analysis by the Axiometrics research firm, which shows rents sliding throughout the region, from San Jose to San Francisco and Oakland.

These are the numbers for December, representing average rents for all types of rentals:

In the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area, average rents dropped year-over-year by 2.4 percent, from $2,706 to $2,640.

In the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco metro area, the year-over-year drop was 2.3 percent — from $3,243 to $3,168.

In the Oakland-Hayward-Berkeley metro area, the year-over-slide was nominal: just 0.6 percent, from $2,314 to $2,301. That makes sense because Oakland rents began to appreciate later than the other metro areas — part of the spillover effect from costly San Francisco and Silicon Valley to the East Bay.

Last year, as rents began softening elsewhere in the region, Oakland rents continued to rise. But over the past few months, Oakland rents have softened, too.

Of course, even with the softening, many Bay Area renters continue to pay through the nose. By contrast, the nationwide average rent stood at just $1,272 in December, up 2.1 percent from $1,246 a year earlier.

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Even with the high costs here, matters may be improving for renters in the region.

“The rental market has pretty much stopped,” said Ron Stern, CEO of Bay Rentals, a housing relocation service. “I don’t know if it’s just a rainy January. But a lot of people” — landlords, property managers — “are getting nervous, because properties are sitting unfilled. They’re losing so much money, it doesn’t make sense. So they rent it out cheaper — drop it a couple of hundred bucks — and get on with it.

“It may not be a lot, but at least it’s going down instead of up,” he said. “And landlords are starting to accept people who have less than perfect credit if they have good explanations for what happened. It’s starting to look like good news for people — a better year for renters.”