Real Estate Report
Fort Worth saw huge surge in wealthy renters over past decade, report says
While we recently learned that Fort Worth homeowners are pretty affluent, another report makes the case that the city's renters are just as flush.
RentCafe used U.S. Census income data, median home sale values from Redfin Data Center, and rent data from Yardi Matrix to work out how many households making $150,000 or more per year became renters between 2007 and 2017, and the results for Texas cities are eye-opening.
Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio all land in the top 20 for cities with the most significant increase in wealthy, renter-occupied households.
For example, in 2007 there were 1,110 high-income renter households in Fort Worth — in 2017, there were 5,063. That's more than four times the growth in a decade, compared to only two and a half times the growth for homeowners in the same income bracket.
Nationwide, more than 1.35 million households making $150,000 or more per year became renters between 2007 and 2017 nationwide, for a 175 percent increase. Homeowners, however, only increased 67 percent during the same decade.
Of the 43.3 million renters nationwide, 2.1 million are top earners. These high-income renters represent the demographic that experienced the largest boom across the U.S. given that, back in 2007, there were only 774,000.
And lest Houston feel left out, it shows up in the top 10 as one of the cities with the highest number of renter-occupied households earning over $150,000 a year. It's the only Texas city in a national group that includes other such cities as Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle.
