LA rents went down—yes, down—in October

After rising steadily for most of 2017, Los Angeles rental prices finally dropped a bit in October, according to a new report from Apartment List.

The decrease was small—only .2 percent—but it ended a streak of eight straight months in which rent prices either increased or stayed put. The median price for a one-bedroom is now $1,350 per month; for a two-bedroom, it’s $1,730.

Those prices represent a 3.9 percent jump in rents since October of 2016. That’s well above the nationwide average increase of 2.7 percent during the same time period, but below average growth across the state, where prices crept up 4.3 percent in the last year.

Apartment List wasn’t the only rental tracker to observe a decrease in prices during the month of October. A separate report from Abodo found that the price of a one-bedroom in LA dropped .73 percent last month.

While Apartment List bases its price calculations on U.S. Census data for the city of Los Angeles, giving a good sense of what people are paying across the city, Abodo relies on listings on its site, giving a good sense of the sticker prices new residents and those looking to relocate within the city may be faced with.

Despite the recent drop, those advertised prices are still pretty high. With median one-bedrooms asking $2,097 and two-bedrooms going for $3,318, LA has the nation’s seventh-costliest rents, according to Abodo’s report.

A recent analysis released by the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate and Beacon Economics projects that rental prices in Los Angeles will jump by an average of $136 per month over the next two years.

• In LA, the soaring cost of rent finally plateaus [Curbed LA]
• Report: LA rents will rise $136 per month by 2019 [Curbed LA]
• Downtown LA’s vacancy rate hits 17-year high [Curbed LA]