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A new study reveals that rent prices in Denver suburbs have climbed faster – often much faster – than in the city itself. And while the trend was first associated with the rise of COVID-19, the latest numbers suggest that habit changes originally prompted by the virus have continued.
The Apartment List report titled “The Suburban Rent Boom Has Been a Constant Throughout the Pandemic” was written by Chris Salviati and Rob Warnock, whose analysis found that in 39 large and medium-sized metropolitan areas across the U.S., rent in suburbs went up by an average of 27.2 percent since March 2020, compared to a 19.8 percent bump for the core cities.
In metro Denver, the gap between the suburbs and the city was even wider. Apartment List’s Erin Giddens points out that “in the first year of the pandemic, rents in the City of Denver fell by 3.7 percent, compared to an increase of 1.8 percent in the metro’s surrounding suburbs. … From the start of the pandemic to the present, Denver rents are up 16 percent, while the metro’s suburbs have seen rents rise by an average of 25.1 percent.”
Co-author Warnock first spoke with Westword about this phenomenon in February 2021. As Warnock pointed out, rent in Denver that January was down 5.5 percent from a year earlier, even as it had increased by 2.7 percent in Thornton and 3.7 percent in Parker. He attributed the rise in the suburbs’ popularity with renters to “the rapid adoption of remote work, increased value of having more space to live and work, and so many people entering the for-sale market,” as well as “people from outside the region who are now moving to Denver’s suburban areas instead of moving to Denver proper.”
In Warnock’s view, “The adoption of remote work has definitely chipped away at the physical bonds that once tied together the housing and labor markets. Pre-pandemic, access to good jobs was largely predicated on being physically close to those jobs. That is no longer the case.”
Many businesses that had gone remote have returned to an in-person approach. However, median rent costs in all seventeen metro Denver suburbs tracked by Apartment List have continued to grow faster than in the city itself. Since March 2020, the increase in Denver has been 16 percent. Glendale came in at 17.1 percent, and the other fifteen suburbs in the survey all jumped up by more than 20 percent, with Castle Rock at 29.9 percent, Westminster at 28.3 percent and Aurora at 26.6 percent.
The differences definitely add up. Denver’s median rent has climbed by $223 from March 2020, when it was was $1,393, to September 2022, which topped out at $1,606 – but in Castle Rock, the price spiked by $505, soaring from $1,707 in March 2020 to $2,217 last month.
The chart below offers specifics:
Will these numbers even out eventually? That’s possible, based on Apartment List’s latest survey, which showed rent prices in September dropping more quickly in the suburbs than in Denver. But so far, the changes are modest, leaving rent in the vast majority of suburbs now higher than in the Mile High City.
