Thinking of Renting in Grand Rapids? Better Hurry or it Will be Gone.

I think you'll have to agree that the Grand Rapids market is a fast growing, popular area to live especially for young professionals and young families.

Many moving here are looking for apartments, condos, or homes. Mortgage rates have bumped up so renting seems to be the answer. Well, it's very tough here. The online publication RentCafe.com ranked Grand Rapids as the second most competitive rental market in the country, just behind Miami, Florida. What?

It's no lie! the publication says that no less than 18 people are competing for each rental unit available in Grand Rapids. Holy cow!

WZZM did a report on this and, according to RentCafe.com, Grand Rapids had 96.9% of apartments in the city occupied during the year with an average of 18 prospective renters competing for each new vacancy. And that's not all. It only took, on average, 28 days to fill a vacancy.

Another problem here is we can't build them fast enough. The demand is huge and keeps growing, but in this year less than 1% of apartments were new.

But wait, there's more. Many who are renting now are happy where they are and renew their leases, so that keeps the availability of existing apartments very low, so with very few being built, there is the problem.

Actually, the competitiveness of the market here has been quietly going on for the last 10 years and it's not slowing down. More and more people are moving the the Greater Grand Rapids Area for good jobs, good schools, etc.

Grand Rapids is described in Wikipedia this way:

"Grand Rapids is a city and county seat of Kent County. At the 2020 census, the city proper had a population of 198,917 which ranks it as the second most-populated city in the state after Detroit. Grand Rapids is the central city of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area, which has a population of 1,087,592 and a combined statistical area population of 1,383,918 million folks.

Grand Rapids is the economic and cultural hub of West Michigan, as well as one of the fastest-growing cities in the Midwest. Together with surrounding communities, it has a diverse economy based in the health care, information technology, automotive, aviation, and consumer goods manufacturing industries, among others."

By the way, Lansing and Ann Arbor also made the list as the 20th most competitive rental markets in the country.