KANSAS CITY, Mo. — According to Rent.com, the median rent in Kansas and Missouri is about $1,200. It's a nearly 10 percent increase since last March in both states.
In Kansas City, Missouri, renters are paying closer to $1,700 on average. It's a tough price to manage for people searching for places in the city.
Ash Lakota lost her apartment in a building fire a couple weeks ago and was suddenly thrust into a new apartment search — a more expensive one than she hoped for.
"It's also kind of sad thinking about the next year of my life be super focused on making the rent instead of how I want to pursue my goals or save money," Lakota said. "I mean, they're all over $1,000 in the same area that I was looking when they were only $700. So just kind of re-framing my perspective on what rent's actually going to start looking like for me."
She found the same thing that the folks at Rent.com found.
"Really interesting when you start looking at the trend over time," said Kate Terhune, the director of brand at Rent.com. "During the pandemic we saw quite a huge boom in terms of rent prices."
A shift away from true affordability has actually stabilized in the midwest over the last few years, but high prices still haven't gone away.
"The average asking rent is about five and a half almost percent higher than it was last year," Terhune said. "So Kansas City is outpacing the bulk of the Midwest in that way."
Going a bit deeper, KC came in seventh out of the 50-largest metros in the US for a year-over-year median rent increases.
KC rent is lower than a national average by $300 a month, but a median of nearly $1,700 is still tough to swallow.
"It's definitely a fear of mine that I won't be able to keep up," Lakota said. "And that's not something that you really want to live with."
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