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Kindly_Boysenberry_7 OP t1_iu68fj6 wrote

Reply to comment by PerlinLioness in RVA Real Estate AMA - "What The H*ll Is Happening?" Edition by Kindly_Boysenberry_7

For rent to go down you'd need to decrease demand for rentals OR increase supply of rental units.

On the supply side, they keep building more apartments. I mean, just Scott's Addition and Manchester must have added 1,000s of units over the last 2-3 years. And I keep saying "There is NO WAY they are going to get $____ for a 1BR unit!" and/or "There is NO WAY we still need all of these apartments in RVA!" And guess what? I keep being wrong. People way smarter than me build more units, and they fill right on up.

NOTE: As an aside, if there is anyone out there who has counted up the number of units added to RVA's apartment inventory since 2018, or knows of a source where I could find those numbers, please share!

On the demand side, more and more people keep moving to RVA. The influx from Northern Virginia/DC ALONE is azy-cray. And many of the people moving in are coming from high cost of living markets - think NoVa, DC, NYC, the West Coast - and they may be making their high cost-of-living salary while working remotely here in RVA. So our rental rates look cheap to them. So unfortunately, for those of us from here, or for those of us who have been here a while, especially if you are making a normal Richmond wage, and not a NYC remote worker wage, these rental rate increases are putting rents in the core of the City out of reach. I mean, I don't understand why any one person would pay $2,000/month to rent an apartment. That's just crazy to me. But the days of $1,200/month 2BR apartments in the Fan is I think, sadly, over.

So it's not that rents CAN'T go down. It's just that we need to have an oversupply of units and/or a whole bunch of people moving out of Richmond.

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tigranes5 t1_iu6xxyx wrote

I've lived in Richmond since the early 1980s. My older brother lived here in the 1970s. Sadly, there has NEVER been a time when apartment rents in the city decreased. There were some years when the average rent prices remained flat, so it can be argued that they decreased relative to inflation. Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle. I doubt that rents will ever actually decrease.

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