{"id":117048,"date":"2016-08-25T05:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/raleighpublicrecord.org\/?p=117048"},"modified":"2016-08-29T16:55:01","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T20:55:01","slug":"development-beat-raleigh-renters-pay-average-of-1-07square-foot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/news\/development-beat\/2016\/08\/25\/development-beat-raleigh-renters-pay-average-of-1-07square-foot\/","title":{"rendered":"Development Beat: Raleigh Renters Pay Average of $1.07\/Square Foot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brought to you by Rufty-Peedin Design Build<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thursday, August 25, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

Are Raleigh renters getting good bang for their buck?<\/p>\n

Eh, more or less.<\/p>\n

\"Downtown<\/a>

James Borden \/ Raleigh Public Record<\/p>

Raleigh’s apartments cost an average of $1.07\/square foot<\/p><\/div>\n

According to an exhaustive list compiled by our friends over at RentCafe<\/a>, which ranked 97 of the country’s most populous cities by how much renters were paying by the square foot.<\/p>\n

Raleigh ranked 36 on the list. Top 40th percentile for most affordable, if that’s how percentile rankings work. Either way, the $1.07 per square foot isn’t\u00a0bad, it isn’t great, it just is.<\/p>\n

Certainly better Manhattan, at least, which at $5.05\/square foot was, to no one’s surprise, the most expensive city on the list. Here’s how that plays out in the real world: $1,000\/month in Raleigh gets you \u00a0That means $1,000\/month here in Raleigh gets you a place that’s about 950 square feet, while $1,000 in NYC gets you 182 square feet. I can’t even imagine how small that is.<\/p>\n

Funny enough, a Google search for “182 square-foot room” turned up exactly that<\/a>: a man in Seattle (of course) apparently converted a tiny storage space of exactly 182 square-feet into a so-called “Pico Dwelling.”<\/p>\n

\"picodwelling\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He spent eight years and $50,000+\u00a0building\u00a0it, but by the time it was finished his 14-year old daughter didn’t want to live there, so he also owns a condo. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of his (presumably ex-) wife in the article. How people this insane get their hands on that kind of money is beyond me, but to be fair, the place is pretty cool looking.<\/p>\n

RentCafe <\/a>pegged the cost per square foot in Seattle at $2.47. By our calculations, a “normal” 182 square-foot apartment there\u00a0would run about $450, although a cursory search turns up no apartments in that price range out there in the Emerald City.<\/p>\n

One of the coolest features in the analysis RentCafe\u00a0<\/a>did was this nifty sliding calculator, which shows you how much you’d get for varying prices in 24 different cities, Raleigh included.<\/p>\n