New 1-bedroom apartments get smaller, now under 900 feet

New apartments in the U.S. saw their average square footage go down in 2022, a report from RentCafe said.

The real estate website found that new apartments’ sizes went down 30 square feet over a 12-month span, coming in at an average of 887 for 2022. Last year’s reduction in space marked the “sharpest drop in one year” and to some extent stemmed from studio and one-bedrooms seeing an increase in what proportion of the market they make up, according to RentCafe.

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In 2021, the nationwide average for new apartments was 917 square feet, the report said. The year prior to that was 913, and pre-pandemic 2019 averaged 910.

Data about apartment size and rent in America’s 100 “largest cities for renters” from Yardi Matrix was used by RentCafe to create its report.

According to the report, the average amount of space offered in a new apartment last year varied by region. The three regions with the most square footage on average were the South at 993 square feet, the Southeast at 983 square feet and Western at 923 square feet, RentCafe found.

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Meanwhile, here were the three regions that the report found to offer on average the smallest amounts of space in new apartments in 2022: 

– Pacific Northwest: 776 square feet

– California: 876 square feet

– Mid-Atlantic: 881 square feet

RentCafe dubbed Tallahassee as the city with the most spacious new apartments of the 100 that it looked at. For a new apartment in the capital of Florida, the average was almost 1,180 square feet, the report found.

On the other end of the spectrum was Seattle. The city, ranked No. 1 for smallest new apartments, averaged 659 square feet for such abodes in 2022, according to RentCafe. That’s more than 500 square feet smaller than the average new apartment in Tallahassee.

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Between 2013 and 2022, the average apartment size has seen a roughly 5.7% drop, according to the report.