San Francisco’s typical asking rent climbed 9.7% over the past year to $3,372, the fastest increase among the large metros Zillow tracks, while Denver fell 0.9%, Austin fell 0.9%, and San Antonio fell 1.8%. All four numbers come from the same July report, which means the national 2.3% rent figure is quietly hiding two opposite housing markets running at the same time.
The split isn’t random. It traces back almost entirely to how much each metro built over the past few years, and what’s happened to that construction pipeline since.
San Francisco and San Jose: rents rising fastest where little got built
San Francisco’s $3,372 typical rent is up 9.7% year over year, and neighboring San Jose isn’t far behind at $3,782, up 7.0%. Both are now the two most expensive large metros in Zillow’s tracking, ahead of even New York, which sits at $3,627 on a slower 4.5% annual pace. Neither Bay Area metro saw anything close to the apartment construction boom that reshaped Sun Belt cities over the same stretch, so there’s no backlog of newly finished units competing for tenants and pulling rents down the way there is elsewhere.
The concession data backs this up directly: only 24.8% of San Francisco listings and 22.2% of San Jose listings carried a concession in July, both well below the 39.8% national rate. Landlords in a market with limited new supply have little reason to offer a free month or a waived fee when demand alone is enough to fill units without a discount.
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Denver, Austin and San Antonio: falling rents where builders overbuilt
The opposite dynamic explains the declines. Denver’s typical rent fell 0.9% to $1,930, Austin fell 0.9% to $1,647, and San Antonio fell 1.8% to $1,425, and all three carry concession rates far above the national average: 67.2% in Denver, 65.1% in Austin, and 56.8% in San Antonio. These were exactly the kind of fast-growing Sun Belt metros that attracted the heaviest apartment construction during the 2022 permitting peak, and landlords there are still competing to fill buildings that were greenlit years ago and are only now finishing.
The regional pattern behind the four cities
The Census Bureau and HUD’s July New Residential Construction report shows the divergence at the regional level too: the South accounted for 755,000 of the nation’s 1,443,000 seasonally adjusted annual permits in July, more than half, while the West accounted for just 309,000. Denver, Austin and San Antonio all sit in regions that built disproportionately more housing relative to their populations over the past several years, and that supply is still working its way through local rental markets in the form of concessions and softer rents. The Bay Area’s much smaller share of that construction wave is a large part of why San Francisco and San Jose never got the same relief on price.
What a mover comparing these metros should actually weigh
A household deciding between a Sun Belt metro and a coastal one shouldn’t just compare today’s rent level; the direction each market is moving matters just as much for anyone signing a longer lease or relocating for a job that could last years. San Antonio’s $1,425 typical rent is well below San Francisco’s $3,372 on its face, but San Antonio’s rent is actively falling while San Francisco’s is climbing at nearly 10% a year, and those trend lines are unlikely to reverse quickly given how differently each metro’s construction pipeline is positioned right now.
For a renter with flexibility about where to live, the current concession gap is the clearest signal available: a market offering deep concessions, like Denver at 67.2% of listings, still has real negotiating room left, while a market like San Francisco, where concessions barely exist, offers none.
A reshuffled list of the nation’s priciest metros
San Francisco’s 9.7% jump is enough to move it past New York in Zillow’s ranking of typical rent among large metros, a shift that would have looked unlikely a year or two ago when San Francisco rents were still recovering from a pandemic-era slump that sent renters, and rents, elsewhere. San Jose’s climb to $3,782 keeps it as the single most expensive metro on the list. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Raleigh, both in the high-concession, high-construction South, remain far cheaper on an absolute basis, at $1,756 and $1,683 respectively, even before accounting for how much negotiating room renters have in each.
Why this pattern likely holds through next year
Zillow’s national forecast calls for multifamily rents to rise around 1.9% for the full year and single-family rents around 2.9%, but those are national averages that mask exactly the kind of metro-level split on display in this report. Nothing in the July permitting data suggests Denver, Austin or San Antonio are about to run out of newly delivered apartments in the next several months, and nothing suggests San Francisco or San Jose are about to see a wave of new supply arrive that would slow their climb. Absent a shift in local construction activity, the gap between these markets is likely to persist through at least the next several rent-report cycles.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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