“We are seeing some encouraging signs in the overall national rental market,” says Rentjungle.com CEO Jon Pastor. “In the second quarter, rent nationwide was up by 2.5% when compared to the first quarter of 2010, which is the continuation of an improvement trend that started in January. Rent in Q4, 2009 was down by approximately 3% from the prior quarter, and during Q1 2010, rent was flat. So an increase of 2.5% in Q2, 2010 is significant.”

Two bedroom apartments saw the largest percentage increase in Q2, up 2% to $1,222 per month. One bedroom apartments were also in demand, up 1% to $970 per month.

Across all apartment sizes, San Diego, San Jose, Norfolk, Providence, Hartford and New Haven all saw rent increases above 4% in the second quarter. The majority of cities realized increases in the 1 to 3% range. Tampa, Tulsa, Hollywood and Indianapolis however, all saw decreases in excess of 1%.

“The rental market appears to have bottomed out in the last quarter of 2009,” said Rent Jungle co-founder Rick Ferris. “This is the first quarter that we have seen significant strength in the two bedroom market, indicating that larger apartments may be coming back in demand as the economy turns. It will be interesting to see if decreases in overall consumer confidence that were reported in June reverse this strong trend heading into the remainder of the summer.”

Rentjungle.com calculates these figures by analyzing over 1 million apartment ads a month. The goal of the site is to help users make more informed decisions.

Rentjungle.com is the most comprehensive rental listing site on the web. It works much like other search engines in that it scours the Internet to amass apartment listings from a variety of sites.  Rentjungle.com employs innovative spidering technology that can detect both when new rentals come on the market and when rents for a particular property change. All of this data is analyzed and stored in order to keep users abreast of the latest happenings in the rental market. Trends can be tracked by city and by neighborhood, furthering the site’s value to users. Users can see searches on an easy, interactive map that links to satellite street views.

Rent increase from July to September, 2009
Percent

Rent decreases were more prevalent across the board with all of the top 10 reporting rent decreases greater than 3%. 4 markets show rent decreases greater than 5%: Boston (10%), Tucson (7.2%), New Orleans (5.4%), Phoenix (5.3%), Albuquerque (4.7%):

Rent decreases from July to September, 2009
Percent