The Greenwich rental market doesn’t get talked about much, but it actually has more transactions than our single-family home market has. That is in boom times and, particularly in bad times. This year the market is opening up and we are seeing more inventory, which is leading to more rentals to meet the demand that is out there.
WHERE: When you look at where our rentals are, they are in every area of town. Most of our apartments, condos and townhouses are concentrated within a half mile of the Post Road and on the west side of town in Byram, Pemberwick and Glenville. So far this year, we have 561 rentals closed and we only have 159 listings for rent. In the larger zones, one acre and above, most rentals are house rentals with the occasional garage apartment and carriage house.
If trends continue, we will have the most rentals since our all-time high rentals of 1,041 in the Covid-year of 2020. The economy is doing well and our days on market are down from last year. Our ratio of list price to rented price is also higher than last year at 98.1%. The average rental price is at an all-time high of $8,715 and our price/sf is up 6.7% from last year. It’s a busier market than the last couple of years.
Graphically, it’s easy to see our market has gotten busier the last three years. Sales have risen and days on market have dropped to very low numbers. We are seeing some more people put their properties up for rent, but we are still not back to our 18-year average of 820 rentals per year. This may explain why our DOM this year is our third lowest ever.
Rentals are up, because inventory is up. We have plenty of demand to meet the increased inventory. Last year at this time we had only 122 properties for rent, and we are up to 159 listings this September or an increase of 30%. This is not a sign of the market slowing, as while we have more inventory our prices are up and our days on market down
Cos Cob has seen the biggest jump with 28 rental listings compared to 13 listings last year. Old Greenwich and South of the Post Road are also both up, but only by the single digits. South of the Parkway i.e. mid-country is the only area where rental inventory is down noticeably from last year.
The nice thing is that we have more rental listings available at our lower end than we had last year. Unfortunately, you couldn’t really call most of them affordable as 64 of the rentals are between $4,000 and $8,000. We have no listings on the GMLS under $2,000, but it’s been that way for several years.
At the high-end, we are down from 21 listings over $18,000 per month to only 14 this year. Our high-end sales have also done very well this year, if you read my August report last week. The stock market is up, and people are buying and renting some very nice houses.
Mark Pruner is a sales executive on the Greenwich Streets Team of Compass Connecticut. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or mark.pruner@compass.com.
