Ever wonder how much renting an apartment goes for someplace besides your own neighborhood or how many square feet you get for $1,500 a month in Timbuktu?
Do you think you can get more bang for your buck in Vienna or Madrid in exchange for a small 500-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles? Or how what about living large in a 1,000 square-foot Viennese “art deco” flat or a 950-square-foot “apartamento” in the Spanish capital?
Well, last year rentcafe.com examined the price-to-space ratio in the 30 most populous cities in the U.S., as well as around the globe, and it discovered how much space you can rent in each for $1,500 per month.
So, if you have ever dreamed of living abroad in such places as England, France, Turkey or anywhere else that floats your boat, rentcafe.com has made it easy for you to see comparisons:
Here are a few interesting highlights:
- Los Angeles comes in 19th for renter value, meaning $1,500/month would rent you a 530- square- foot apartment. Istanbul is in the lead with a whopping 1,900-square-foot for the same money.
- Think the City of Angels is expensive? Think again. You’re better off living in LA than in London, Zurich or Paris, where renters hardly find something more than a glorified storeroom for a decent price. These European cities boast per-square-foot rates above $4, spurring renters to look for micro-apartments.
- If 500 square feet is enough for you, Washington and Tokyo are great alternatives with similar costs of renting as LA.
- But if space comes first, for $1,500/month you can rent an apartment three times more spacious in Berlin or you could choose to truly live large in a 1,700-square-foot apartment in Shanghai.
The Study
Rentcafe.com learned these cities have strong economies and rank well not just for research and development and environment, but also cultural interaction and accessibility. You can read more about the findings at rentcafe.com
As a basis of this study, RENTCafé analysts used the Mori Memorial Foundation’s Institute for Urban Strategies’ ranking of the world’s most magnetic cities, as published in its Global Power City Index 2016 report.
All the prices per square foot and m2 represent the average rents for one-bedroom apartments, or their US Dollar-equivalents.
The average price/ square foot data for the US markets was provided by Yardi Matrix, an apartment market intelligence source and RENTCafé’s sister company which researches and reports on all multifamily properties of 50+ units across 124 markets in the United States. For the sources of average rent data for the international cities included in this study. Cities researched included: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Osaka, Paris, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Zurich
Now that you know where you can get the most space for your hard-earned money, where will you choose to call home and hang your hat?