Guess what’s supposedly coming, Orange County apartment dwellers?
Triple-digit rent increases over the next two years.
(Please, try to contain your excitement.)
This bit of bad news is brought to you by a USC Lusk Center for Real Estate study released Tuesday.
According to the 2016 USC Casden Multifamily Forecast, rents are expected to jump from 2015 levels by $149 in Orange County by 2018.
Don’t look other directions for relief, especially south, where in San Diego County renters can expect a $155 hike over the same time frame. It’s less in the Inland Empire ($84) and Los Angeles County ($109) but as you can see they are going up everywhere.
Why?
“Though multifamily construction permits are back to pre-recession levels and have provided some relief, population and employment growth are driving up demand faster than new inventory can hit the market. For renters, new construction has simply kept a bad situation from getting drastically worse,” explains Raphael Bostic, interim director of the Lusk Center.
Rents have actually been on a continual rise here. Orange County’s average rent of $1,587 in 2015 was up $81 from the year before. The report pegs OC’s average 2018 rent at $1,736.
Landlords could at least throw in free HBO.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.