Apartment rents are indeed climbing, hitting an average of $1,494 a month in Southern California for the last three months of 2007, an increase of 4.5% over the same period a year earlier, according to a survey of larger apartment complexes by RealFacts, a property research firm.Yet housing prices are falling sharply. The median price for homes and condominiums in the six-county region fell to $415,000 last month, 18% below last year's peak, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
But just because home prices are falling doesn't mean rents should be dropping too. In fact, home values and rents often move in opposite directions, real estate analysts said.
"The downward pressure on house prices and the upward pressure on rents are in some respects reciprocal of one another," said Stuart Gabriel, director of the Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA. "The two go hand in hand."
