Following a year in which renters across the country were “intensely searching for apartments” in Atlanta, the Big Peach has been named the top U.S. city to watch in 2024 as the apartment market is concerned.

That’s according to the RentCafe Year-End Market Report, which found that Atlanta attracted the highest rental activity on national apartment search website RentCafe.com over the past 12 months.

The study also took into account which rental markets are poised to be popular in the new year, based on four key factors.

The findings are based on RentCafe.com’s research team’s analysis of millions of interactions on its website pertaining to apartment stock in the country’s 150 largest cities.  

Atlanta was named the No. 1 market to watch in 2024, followed by smaller cities Kansas City and Cincinnati, respectively.

Analysts cited Atlanta’s “transformed Midtown and IT brainpower source Georgia Tech” as major factors keeping the city on renters’ radar throughout the year that was.

“In fact, renters favorited 60 percent more Atlanta apartments in 2023 compared to 2022, which shows an increased intent to move to this welcoming Southern city,” according to the year-end summary. “The city’s appeal to renters was also shown by the overall high rate of saved searches on RentCafe.com as Atlanta ranked first among all 150 cities we analyzed for this specific metric.”

RentCafe

Atlanta’s rental scene performed well in RentCafe’s monthly studies throughout 2023, especially when the city was slotted as the No. 1 hottest rental market in April, marking the beginning of the high season. 

More broadly, the South saw nine cities make the top 30 for renter activity in 2023. That was topped, however, by the Midwest’s 12 cities in that bunch, including Minneapolis, Chicago, Columbus, Indianapolis, and others.

Below is a snapshot of RentCafe.com’s top 20 cities to watch for rental activity in 2024. The ranking is based on the sum of scores across four categories: availability of apartments, pageviews among millions of listings, apartments saved as favorites, and saved personalized searches:

RentCafe

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