by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:

Unemployment and work-from-home or work-from-anywhere are massively shifting where people want to live.

Apartment rents in 15 of the 100 largest rental markets in the US have shot up between 10% and 16% in October compared to a year ago – all second-tier markets with far lower rents than the most expensive markets. But in the most expensive rental markets, such as San Francisco, New York City, Boston, San Jose, Los Angeles, Washington DC, etc., rents have plunged between 13% and 21% in October  year-over-year, which I covered a few days ago.

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Of the 100 largest rental markets, 58 experienced increases in the median asking rent for 1-bedroom apartments in October compared to a year ago, ranging from 1.1% in San Antonio, Texas, to 15.6% in Newark, NJ, which is catching some of the crowd getting out of New York City.

Newark’s 15.6% jump took the median asking rent for 1-bedroom apartments to $1,480. This compares to New York City’s median asking rent of $2,550, down 15.0% year-over-year.

This dynamic is playing out in many cities where people can work from home and have to commute to the office only occasionally. And when people no longer need to go to the office at all and can work from anywhere, or have lost their jobs, they can branch further out, to places like St Louis, Missouri, where the median 1-BR rent soared by 15.5% to $970, or Cleveland, Ohio, where it soared by 15.1% to $1,070. If you can save $20,000 a year on rent, why not? OK, you give up the glories that Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco offer, but that logic appears to be sinking in – forced by circumstances or voluntarily.

The 33 Cities where 1-BR rents jumped 5% or more.

In 33 of the 100 largest rental markets, rents soared by 5% or more in October, compared to a year ago, topping out with Newark (+ 15.6%). In 15 of these cities, rents jumped by over 10%, huge moves in an expense item that tends to eat up between one-third and well over one-half of the household budget.

In 29 of those cities, the median asking rent for a 1-BR apartment is still less than half of the 1-BR rent in San Francisco ($2,800), despite the increases in those cities and despite the plunge in San Francisco. But the gap is narrowing:

The data set was provided by Zumper, which collects them from the Multiple Listings Service (MLS) and other listings, including its own listings, in the 100 largest rental markets. The data set covers apartments in apartment buildings, including new construction, but doesn’t cover single-family houses-for-rent and condos-for-rent.

The rents here are “median asking rents.” “Median” means half of the asking rents are higher in this market, and half are lower. “Asking rent” is the advertised rent, the amount that the landlord wishes to obtain, similar to a price tag on an item in a store. It’s a measure of the current market. But it does not measure what long-term tenants are actually paying in rent, such as under rent control. Asking rents do not include concessions, such as one-month free or two months free, which reduce the effective rent.

In cities such as San Francisco, where asking rents have been in free-fall since April, tenants on existing leases or long-term tenants whose leases have switched to month-to-month will see no rent declines unless they move to a cheaper place, or threaten to and get the landlord to cut the rent, instead of losing a tenant.

The 25 Cities where 1-BR rents fell 5% or more.

This list, the other side of the ledger, includes the most expensive rental markets in the US, but it also includes cities with a relatively high student population that has now thinned out (for example Syracuse), big cities that aren’t expensive but are fairly crowded, some cities involved in the Oil Bust, cities involved in the airplane manufacturing bust (Wichita, KS), and other cities for a variety of reasons:

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