published on February 5, 2019 - 12:42 PM

Written by The Business Journal Staff

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Monthly rental rates in Fresno rose, on average, by 6.2 percent in January compared to a year earlier – the fifth highest rate of increase among mid-sized U.S. cities.

That’s according to the latest data on rental rates put out by RENTCafé.com, an apartment search website that also provides data on the housing market.

Monthly rental rates in Fresno grew to an average of $1,048 year to year, a rate outpaced among mid-sized cities only by Mesa, Arizona – the highest at 8.4 percent – along with Long Beach, Cleveland and Riverside.

RENTCafé also offered a list of major cities with the highest rental growth year to year, with Las Vegas topping the list at 8.3 percent, and small cities, with Midland, Texas topping that list at 17.7 percent.

“Texas’ oil patch continues to fuel the fastest increases in rent nationwide,” states the report noting the year-to-year rent increases in Midland and Odessa, the latter having its rental rated grown by more than 14 percent.

RENTCafé developed its list by researching rent data on apartment buildings and complexes with at least 50 units in the 252 largest U.S. cities.

In addition, the researchers looked only at cities with populations over 100,000 that had rental stocks of at least 2,900 apartments meeting the other criteria.

As such, smaller Valley cities, including Visalia, Hanford and Madera, weren’t included in the research. Bakersfield was included, with a 4.4 percent average rental rate increase to $975 from January 2018 to January of this year.

Still, the report states that that some of the sharpest rates of rent growth nationally occurred in small cities, Midland, Odessa, Reno and Henderson, Nevada among them.

Nationally, the city with the highest average rental rate in January was Manhattan, at $4,201 a month, followed by San Francisco, at $3,609 a month.

Nationally, rental rates averaged $1,420 a month in January, a year-over-year increase of 3.3 percent, or $45, RENTCafé reports.

It goes on to say that 93% of the cities surveyed had average rents rise over that one-year period, while 5 percent of the cities had prices that remained flat and just 2 percent had declines in their rental rates.

To see the data online, go to https://bit.ly/2WM38Sy.