Here’s why rental units in the US are now bigger in size
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Following a period of shrinking floor plans, rentals are growing in square footage.
A new report from the apartment search website RentCafe has found that the size of new US apartments is once again rising, most notably in large cities including San Francisco, Manhattan, Chicago and Washington, DC.
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Nationwide, RentCafe found that new rental apartments are on average 916 square feet, 27 square feet larger than they were last year, with certain cities’ tenants gaining more space than others. Chicagoans gained an average of 97 square feet over the past decade, while San Franciscans gained 73 square feet over the same period.
The reason for the trend towards general growth is no mystery. The report attributes it to a large sum of under-construction housing finally coming to market in recent months. And although one-bedrooms led new construction (and composed 48.3% of it), the new housing stock also includes a large quantity of two- and three-bedroom units.
Of all major US cities, Tucson, Arizona has seen the most sizable growth, with units increasing in size by more than 33% in the last 10 years, shortly followed by Gainesville, Florida, with a 19.7% rental apartment size increase. Gainesville also takes the crown for largest average new apartment size at 1,173 square feet.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan, new apartments have grown in the last decade, but by a measly 2.2%, bringing the average size to just 737 square feet.
Still, that’s significantly better than Seattle, where new apartments are on average 661 square feet, a 3.6% decrease from 10 years ago, thus earning the Pacific Northwest city the dubious title of smallest new apartments in America.
Another trend noted by the report is that while larger apartments are growing larger, smaller rentals are shrinking.
At the same time that studios shed an average of 54 square feet over the past 10 years, three-bedrooms gained 19.
