What’s the real average rent in Oakland?

Until very recently, it was difficult to get a clear sense of how much people are paying to rent apartments in Oakland, and how prices have fluctuated over time. 

Media and government agencies often report on “average rents,” but those calculations are typically based on data from apartment listing sites like RentCafe or Zillow, which only tell part of the story. These numbers often reflect only apartments currently on the market and can skew toward certain types of properties whose owners feel comfortable using these platforms. The city has not historically tracked rent prices in a methodical manner.

But last year, Oakland created its first-ever rental registry. Landlords are now required to share detailed information about each of their rental units—apartments, studios, houses, even RVs—with the city on an annual basis. We obtained a copy of this new rent registry, which includes information like the amount each tenant is currently paying in rent and what they paid before their last rent increase. The registry also includes the date each tenant moved into their home, the property owner’s name, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in each home.

Oakland’s new registry still doesn’t provide a complete picture of rentals in the city. Only owners of properties built more than 10 years ago must register their units. This means the database includes all rent-controlled homes in Oakland and many additional properties, but nothing constructed since 2013, like a lot of the new tall buildings downtown. 

And according to the city, only about half of the units that should be in the rent registry have been entered so far. To incentivize landlords to follow the new law and register, the city prohibits any property owner who hasn’t signed up from raising rents or evicting tenants. Once the database is fuller, the city plans to make it publicly accessible, a spokesperson told us.

Despite the missing data, the registry is still the fullest, most revealing source of information about Oakland’s rental market yet, including information on more than 43,000 homes.

How much does an Oakland studio apartment cost? How about a three-bedroom?

We calculated the median rents for each unit size included in the registry. The median reflects the middle-value of all the rental prices in the database, or the middle-value for each type of home. This may be the most accurate measure of typical rents. The mean average rent calculation, on the other hand, can be distorted more by errors in the dataset or outliers. 

Before making these calculations, we cleaned up the data some. We removed all entries where rents were at least $10,000 per month or $100 and under. Reviewing the data, it is clear that most of these highs and lows are typos or, in some cases, extreme outliers. (That…