MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- If you have scoured the "For Rent" ads looking for a nice place to live in the Minneapolis urban core you know what I'm saying when I say the pickings have never been slimmer.
"People are fighting over the opportunity to get what is best out there," Realtor Jeff Lundquist said of the tight rental market.
The vacancy rate in Minneapolis, for rentals, is just over 2 percent.
That is the third lowest apartment vacancy rate in the country and you know what that number is doing?
You guessed it, bringing developers in to build urban apartment buildings as quickly as the city signs off on the permits.
"The fact that we had this housing bubble burst and people are now saying I want rental and I want to be in the Urban Core," Minneapolis City Housing policy director Tom Streitz said Friday.
And this isn't your grandma's apartment of yesteryear, nearly all of the new construction is for luxury apartments.
That means the rent is around 12 to 16 hundred dollars for a one bedroom, but it comes with perks.
"The trend is absolutely towards high amenity, what we call high amenity rentals so basically dry cleaning, work out needs, everything you need in the building or within close proximity," Streitz said.
The fact is, all over the country, and especially in Minneapolis the housing market woke up a lot of people from the home ownership version of the American dream and that drove all those owners, combined with an already healthy renters population into the same pool of housing.
Not to mention the other group coming into high end rentals, baby boomers saying "buh-buy" to a big home with all the trimmings, and hello to the perks of luxury apartments and condos.
In the 4th quarter alone in 2011 the city of Minneapolis issued permits to build 19-hundred residential units in downtown alone.
A few hundred will be done next summer so we will soon find out if this much build up was needed...to pamper essentially a new city full of people.
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