Tales of the Incredible Shrinking Apartment
Millennials prefer living in locations close to restaurants and entertainment rather than having large kitchens or living rooms for entertaining, and also make living choices motivated by price.
DALLAS—If it seems that space is dwindling while rents are increasing, the answer is yes. As rentals have been growing in both popularity and pricing during the past decade, floorplans have been slowly shrinking in size.
Numerous changes in renters’ living habits are literally redrawing floorplans. The largest share of apartment dwellers, Millennials, prefer living in locations close to restaurants and entertainment rather than having large kitchens or living rooms for cooking or entertaining. But the rising interest in smaller living spaces is equally motivated by price, as the need to save on rent sparks demand for smaller units.
According to RentCafe’s newest analysis of apartment sizes, the average rent in newly built US apartments has increased by 28% compared to 2008, while the sizes have gotten 5% smaller. That is, the average size of a new apartment completed in 2018 is 941 square feet, 52 square feet less or 5% smaller than the size of an apartment built 10 years ago, according to the analysis using Yardi Matrix data.
That said, the symbol of downtown living, studio apartments, have shrunken the most, by more than 10% as compared to 10 years ago, having been reduced from 573 square feet in 2008 to 514 square feet this year. The average US studio apartment has a square footage of 472 square feet and the size of a one-bedroom apartment is 714 square feet, while a two-bedroom apartment has an average living space of 1,006 square feet.
Contrary to the growing interest in smaller units, studio apartments continue to represent a small piece of the rental market, only 5% of all US apartments. One-bedroom rental units make up the largest chunk of the national apartment stock (43%) and those floorplans have decreased by 4% during the last decade, while two-bedroom apartments have recorded the least change in size, down by only 0.5% on average.
The average size of apartments, regardless of year built, is 882 square feet, with the largest apartments in the Southeast boasting 975 square feet of living space and the smallest in Seattle, with an average size of 711 square feet. New York City and Chicago have the second smallest rentals at 733 square feet, while Tallahassee, FL offers the most spacious US rentals at 1,038 square feet on average.
“When zooming in on Dallas-Fort Worth metro, new apartments in Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano and Irving have all shrunken in size between 4% to 8% over the past decade, while their rents have grown between 40% to 50% during the same period of time,” Ioana Popovici, communications specialist of RENTCafé, tells GlobeSt.com. “Lewisville is the only exception, with its new apartments actually seeing the second biggest increase in average size in the country at 17%.”
Looking at the average apartment size in DFW regardless of year built, Plano takes the crown with 940 square feet, followed by Lewisville (891 square feet), Fort Worth (859 square feet), Irving (848 square feet), Dallas (837 square feet) and Arlington (818 square feet), GlobeSt.com learns. Rental apartments in Lubbock, TX, on the other hand, have reported a sizeable increase in space during the last decade, up 19%. Apartments built in Lubbock in 2018 average as much as 1,326 square feet.