You’ll Pay More for Rent in Grapevine, Frisco

Grapevine has plenty of attractions.

It has Grapevine Lake, a historic downtown, the nearby Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the neighboring industrious planned community of Las Colinas, and it surrounds the Texas 114/121 freeway corridor that puts the area squarely between Dallas and Fort Worth. Apartment properties make these pitches to lure potential renters.

But, if you’re a renter, obviously, you’ll pay for those amenities.

According to the Zumper Dallas Metro Area Report that covered 20 DFW cities, Grapevine has the most expensive rent for a one-bedroom apartment at $1,300 in August.

Frisco was second, but its rent fell from 2.3 percent to $1,260 per month.

Mesquite had the lowest at $880. Dallas and Farmers Branch were tied for third at $1,230. The state median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $954 in August. The national one-bedroom median rent was $1,233.

In comparison, a one bedroom in San Francisco will set you back $3,040, well ahead of New York’s $2,700. But those rents are the lowest price points since Zumper started tracking media prices in 2014. San Francisco took a 14.1 percent plunge over year to year. New York was down 10.9 percent from a year ago.

The Zumper Dallas Metro Area Report analyzed active listings that hit the market in August. Listings are aggregated by city to calculate median asking rents.

McKinney had the fast-growing rental increasing, up 8.7 since this time last year.

Bedford and Euless, two suburbs that make up the Mid-Cities area, experienced increases. Bedford rent jumped 8 percent and Euless 5.8 percent, including a 4.8 percent month over month increase. Bedford had the highest jump for two-bedroom rent at $1,260, which was a 12.5 percent increase.

The two-bedroom totals varied slightly. Frisco had the most-expensive two-bedroom rents at $1,730, which was down 2.8 percent year to year. Mesquite’s two-bedroom rent was $1,120, down 4.3 percent from a year ago.

Grapevine’s two-bedroom rent ranked second at $1,690, tying it with Dallas.

More on the Rental Front

We now know Grapevine has the most expensive apartments. But which city gives you the most elbow room in your apartment? In Dallas-Fort Worth, that honor belongs to Prosper, according to a RENTCafé study.

Prosper apartments average 1,051 square feet. Similar apartments in Dallas run 847 square feet.

The RENTCafé study is exclusively based on apartment data related to buildings containing 50 or more units.

“Large apartments are typically found in high-rated, newer buildings, known as class A in the industry,” says Sanziana Bona, a RENTCafé researcher. “In contrast, the suburbs with smaller apartments have mostly B or lower-rated buildings.

“There has been a trend to build top-rated properties with larger units which started in the early 2000s and peaked in 2019.”

And in more rental news …

• The Dallas-Fort Worth area is forecast to complete 19,318 new apartment units by the end of 2020, best in the nation, according to data compiled by Yardi Matrix. This would be DFW’s third consecutive year to lead all metro areas for annual apartment construction. Second place again is the New York metro area, which is expected to see 15,952 new apartments in 2020. A sign of Texas’ growth: Houston is third with 10,404 and Austin fifth with 9,342.
• Who wants to move to the Dallas area? According to ApartmentList.com’s third-quarter Renter Migration Report, people from Houston (9 percent), San Antonio (5.2 percent) and Austin (4.3 percent) have made searches from April 1 to Aug. 11 to relocate to Dallas. How about those who want to move out of the Dallas area? People look at Austin (10.8 percent), Houston (7.5 percent) and Los Angeles (5.1 percent).