Renting in Denver is actually about $34 cheaper than renting in its suburbs, according to a study by Zillow.
If that sounds crazy, then maybe it's because Denver rents downtown rose faster than in the suburbs over the last year, Zillow says.
Or maybe it sounds crazy because urban rents being cheaper than suburban rents is the opposite of the national trend, according to Zillow.
Nationally, Zillow found that suburbs rents are rising faster than urban rents. The trend was most pronounced in areas where rental affordability worsened over the past year, like San Francisco.
There are some signs that Denver's urban rental market isn't white hot, which would help explain the counterintuitive finding. Lately, many apartments are slashing their advertised rates, not hiking them up.
And Denver has pretty good suburbs that can command a higher price, at least when it comes to for-sale housing. In April, Littleton had a median sale price of $440,550 for a single-family home, compared to a $425,000 median in Denver.
Anyway, the unusual finding is another ultimately another reminder that measuring rents is hard. Rent Cafe looked at the same urban/suburb split and came up with a different result in their "new study." (Theirs looked at a period from 2011 to 2015 -- which was is too old to be relevant to current prices in my opinion.)
My advice is to rent where the price is good, whether it's a suburb or a city, how about that?
