Rental prices in some of the country's largest cities are falling—some by almost 45 percent, according to new data from Five Star Cash Offer, a real estate investment firm that operates as a direct cash homebuyer. The dataset, which includes the top 65 metropolitan areas in the United States, reveals that cities that have recently enacted pro-housing policies have experienced the most significant year-over-year decline in rental prices nationwide.
The data from Five Star Cash Offer supports recent reports from online real estate brokerages Redfin and Realtor, which detail a decline in rent prices across some of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Sarasota, Florida, is the city with the highest annual decline, with a 42.67 percent drop (from $3,290 to $1,886) in average rent from January 2024 to January 2025. In recent years, the City Commission has adopted a series of pro-housing policies aimed at addressing the city's housing crisis, such as the easing of restrictions on mixed-use and higher-density developments in 2022. In 2024, the commission passed several additional measures to relax density restrictions and allocated $40 million for affordable housing projects.
