The national rent median sits at $1,987 a month, up about 0.75% compared to last year, basically flat compared to last month, Rent.com said.
In Ohio, the median rent is $1,419, up 0.3% compared to last year.
Early- to mid-spring is generally considered leasing season, the traditional season for looking for new apartments, Terhune said.
Among local apartment-searchers recently was Dayton resident Rhonda Easley. Today, Easley — a 58-year-old income tax preparer — is happy in her Kingsford Drive duplex. But she went through the wringer with what she felt was unfair treatment by a former landlord in the former Salem Mall area, about five minutes from where she lives now.
Easley said she received only a 30-day notice for rent increases, although she was required to give 60 days’ notice before she moved. That and other issues inspired her to become a founding member of a local tenants union.
Tension between renters and owners is nothing new, but good tenants and good landlords need each other, Easley said. She wants to pre-match good landlords with good renters, through the union.
“We have bad renters who tear up houses,” she said. “When they move, they (landlords) have to put up thousands of dollars in for the next person. And then you have the bad landlords who don’t want to do anything but take the money.”
“Both parties are trying to listen to each other,” she added. “We’re trying to come up with something that can bring us all together.”
Supply and demand
Rent.com put the median rent in the “Central Dayton and Kettering” area at $1,144, which represents a 4.83% increase from last year.
In Greene County, median rents are $1,118, which is a 5.45% increase over last year, according to the same site.
Other area monthly rent medians, according to the site’s data: North Dayton/Miami County: $1,236, an increase of just over 2%; Northwest Dayton comes in at $989, an increase of nearly 7%; and South Montgomery County, $1,257, an increase of just over 5%.
Last year, rent in most Dayton suburbs was up over the previous year, also according to Rent.com. Rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Fairborn last year was $1,145, up 25%. Rent last year for a one-bedroom was up 10% and 9% in Beavercreek and Kettering, respectively.
Multiple factors are pushing rents up, Terhune said. The supply of new apartment units in the Dayton area is down, and with higher interest rates, some apartment-dwellers who might be buying houses (and vacating their apartments) have held off, she said.
“Supply and demand have been a huge factor, of course, and the housing market has been another big one, with interest rates being so high,” she said. “Tons of people are avoiding buying houses right now because they don’t want to spend 6% a month on their interest.”
People are staying in rental markets longer, agreed Marcus Roth, a spokesman for the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. Higher-income residents are competing with lower-income counterparts for rental housing, he said.
Construction is another important factor. There are more apartments nationally. “That’s going to be help, a little bit,” with national rents, Terhune said.
But she added: “In Dayton, though, it is a different story. There has been a 38% decrease in the number of new units coming on the market this year.”
For that metric, she said she drew on an industry resource called RealPage. The metric is the number of new units becoming available in the market this year vs. last year, though the volume is relatively low.
Bottom line: There are expected to be 649 new units hitting the market in Dayton vs. 1,057 new units last year, Terhune said.
Demographics require the nation to build 4.3 million new apartments by 2035, according to a 2022 study by the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association.
Still, Dayton remains relatively affordable.
“You’re definitely going to see more affordability in Dayton than some of the bigger cities,” Terhune said, noting that Columbus has an median monthly rent of $1,728, Indianapolis’ median is $1,500 and Chicago’s is $2,300
‘It’s scary’
Roth, of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, said in an interview that the COVID-19-era pandemic spike in rents ended in late 2022, when there was a slight “market correction.”
But now rents are climbing again, “although not at the crazy rate we saw during the peak of COVID,” he said.
“Given the fact that Dayton rents increased nearly 24% over two years from the start of the pandemic, it’s alarming that they’re increasing again,” Roth said. “This shows that the market is not working, especially for the 31,000 extremely low-income renters in the Dayton area who are struggling to avoid eviction and homelessness as rents keep rising.”
Destiny Brown, a community organizer with the Dayton office of ABLE (Advocates for Basic Legal Equality), said many tenants have reached out to the local tenant union — a group that tries to empower tenants to share their concerns with landlords and elected officials ― to see what alternatives they have when rents become too high.
“Unfortunately, there are none,” Brown said.
She and union members are frustrated by what they believe is a “lack of city enforcement of tenant protections.” In some cases, they are seeing rent increases in the midst of a lease term, “as no parameters are currently being enforced to address this problem,” Brown said.
In Dayton, a renter needs to earn $18.63 an hour to afford a basic two-bedroom apartment, Roth said. However, the average renter wage-earner earns $18.10, he said.
In Montgomery County, 23% of renters here spending more than half their income on rent — leaving less for food, transportation, medical care, fixing a vehicle or other expenses, he said.
Roth says he sees a landscape in which the level of evictions has returned to pre-pandemic eviction rates. Homelessness is rising as well, he said.
“When people can’t afford the rent, they get evicted,” he said. And when they get evicted, they move in with friends or family typically before availing themselves of shelters or emergency homeless services.
“That’s what’s going on,” Roth said. “It’s scary.”
He sees a broad solution in creating more (and preserving more) affordable housing. Those programs have been under-invested in for many years, Roth contends.
“That’s the best thing we can do to try to get ourselves out of the situation,” he said.
Last July, a state housing tax credit program and a single-family housing tax credit program were part of the state’s two-year, $191 billion budget that Gov. Mike DeWine signed that month.
Jennifer Holp, president of the Greater Dayton Apartments Association and vice president of operations with Sundance Property Management, agrees that fewer apartments have been available, but she doesn’t see that as necessarily new for the Dayton market.
Turnover rates were reduced during the pandemic, and they have budged little since then, she said.
“You just haven’t had any vacancies,” Holp added.
And Dayton has typically been “behind the times” when it comes to raising rents, typically lifting rates only after property owners in larger cities do so, Holp said.
“We saw a lot of growth over the past year with rent increases, and we are seeing them still at the start of this year, but we are certainly (also) seeing a plateau, things are starting to slow down a little bit,” she said.
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