It took Cathy Canzano and her fiancé nearly four months to find their affordable 450-square-foot studio in Port Hueneme, where they pay $780 each month, including utilities.
But after more than six months in the small space, the 23-year-old caregiver hopes they can move to a bigger apartment in Camarillo to avoid driving almost 30 miles to-and-from work.
Canzano has spent the last few weeks scouring Craigslist during her spare time and the least-expensive option she has come across was $1,200 per month for a 500-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment.
"It's been a frustrating search," she said. "I definitely noticed an extreme rise in rent costs between different cities."
Canzano is not alone. Ventura County renters saw about a 3 percent rise in rent prices since last year and are now forking over an average of $1,532 every month to live in apartments or town homes, according to the combined findings of national and local data firms. The national firm noted the county is the fifth most expensive market in California.
Even with increasing rents, the competition for an available unit — even one that's cramped and overpriced — is fierce because the average occupancy rate stands at nearly 97 percent. If you don't seize it, there's a good chance you'll lose out.
Dyer Sheehan Group Inc. in Ventura surveys 188 apartment properties throughout the county ranging in size from three units to 608 units — a total of nearly 20,800 units.
Its semiannual report is expected to be completed by mid-August, but preliminary results show a little lower county average rent of $1,509, a 2.9 percent increase from last year.
(View the Interactive Google map: Ventura County average rent by city and the Infographic: Renting in Ventura County.)
The local market "is solid and we expect modest rent growth to continue over the foreseeable future — whatever that is, two or three years," Vice President and CFO Paul Sheehan said. "We don't see anything happening that is going to change that trajectory."
Rents and occupancy rates are generally increasing slowly in Ventura County, but "it fluctuates back and forth a little bit and each market has its own characteristics," Sheehan said.
Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village had the highest average rent at $1,722 — a 6 percent increase from last year — and the average rate for three-bedroom units jumped 12 percent since January, Sheehan said.
Fillmore had the lowest rent with a monthly average of $978, a year-over-year increase of about 6 percent, he added.
Sheehan said his best bet for cities that will see a greater rent increase are Camarillo, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks, but that can depend on economic growth.
"One of the biggest limitations to how much rent people can charge — beside competition and things like that — is simply people's income," he said. "People have to qualify and until we get better job growth and the kind of jobs that pay good money, you're going to see, to some degree, a cap to how high these things can go. If people had more money to spend, these rents would be higher now."
RealFacts, a San Francisco-based firm, calculated an average Ventura County rent of $1,554 after tracking 76 local developments with at least 100 rental units. The overall cost was calculated by averaging the typical rents for different types of units — from $1,046 for a studio to $2,172 for a three-bedroom town home.
Dyer Sheehan Group's results usually vary from those produced by RealFacts because the national company focuses on large apartment complexes that tend to run on the high-end of the market and offer more amenities than the typical "mom-and-pop" properties, Dyer Sheehan Group President Dawn Dyer said.
The RealFacts average rent ranks Ventura County behind San Jose, $2,128; San Francisco, $1,971; Santa Cruz, $1,743; and Los Angeles, $1,727.
HIGH DEMAND
The rise in rent extends beyond California, however. There was a national year-over-year average rent increase of 4.4 percent to $1,075 and only one of the 41 markets surveyed by RealFacts in June experienced a decrease — Albuquerque, N.M., with a drop of $4.
"The economy is getting better, employment is up but there wasn't a lot of development in the last number of years and that's pent up demand," RealFacts spokesman Nick Grotjahn said.
But Grotjahn said relief could come sooner rather than later to renters nationwide. Rent prices were going up "pretty dramatically" since 2010, but the steep rise in rents has started to flatten over the last few quarters.
"In the last six months — the real estate market has come back" and the supply available to renters is increasing, Grotjahn said.
Developers had to play catch up after a lack of construction from 2007 to 2009 following the mortgage crisis and onslaught of foreclosures that sent homeowners into rental properties — increasing the demand, Grotjahn said.
Apartment complexes that started construction in 2010 and 2011 are beginning to become available because it can take as long as two years of finish a project, he added.
By 2014, Grotjahn said rent prices could actually start to drop or at least remain steady because supply will start to meet demand with new developments coming online.
While Grotjahn said most urban cores have skylines dotted with cranes building new apartment complexes, Sheehan said that is not exactly the case in Ventura County.
"There's a lot of people that want to build apartment complexes out here — including big national companies — but the barriers for entry are high and it's hard to get approvals," he said. "Both economically and in terms of entitlement processing, these things take a long time so there's not a whole lot of stuff that's coming online."
There are a number of other factors contributing to the rise in rental prices, Grotjahn said, including a new trend of more people choosing the "lifestyle" of renting properties rather than becoming homeowners.
"There's a lot of young people not looking to buy a house any time soon," he said. "They're renters by choice."
FADING DREAM
Vita Sondors, 23, and her boyfriend have been renters since 2009, but it's not a lifestyle she hopes to stick with for much longer.
"Every month that we pay rent it's like, ‘I wish that this could be going toward a mortgage,'" Sondors said. "It's always heartbreaking that we're putting all this work into our rental and we're just going to leave it."
The couple has been living in a midtown Ventura duplex for the past year and spend countless weekends on home-improvement projects, whether it's putting in new wood floors, building a small garden of succulents and pepper plants, or replacing screen doors.
Sondors went from paying $900 per month for a large two-bedroom in Santa Paula, but was willing to pay more to live in Ventura.
Sondors said they fell in love with the area and have no intention to leave, but would rather be in a home they can call their own. However, she said coming up with a 10 percent down payment for nearby two-bedroom houses priced at $350,000 is daunting.
"We have decent jobs and we're both educated," said Sondors, a marketing coordinator for a Carpinteria insurance company. "We maybe would be able to save $500 a month. I don't know how people do it anymore."
The National Low Income Housing Coalition ranked the region covering Oxnard, Ventura and Thousand Oaks as the eighth most-expensive metropolitan area in the United States — behind other districts in Hawaii, California, Connecticut and New York, according to its annual March report.
The rank is determined by the hourly wage — nearly $29 per hour in Ventura County — that a household must earn to afford a two-bedroom unit priced at fair market rent without giving up more than 30 percent of their monthly income.
The report determined that Ventura County households need to hold more than 3.5 minimum wage jobs to comfortably afford a local two-bedroom unit rented for $1,499 per month, which is the fair market rent determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
FORCED TO ADAPT
Coletta Herbold, 43, has been living in Ventura on and off for more than two decades, but her chances of renting an apartment diminished when she went from a two-income household to one. Herbold was going through a divorce at the same time her mother decided to move to Ventura seven months ago, bringing with her only a small Social Security stipend.
"She couldn't afford to live by herself," Herbold said. "She qualifies for housing assistance but there's a three-year waiting list."
Unable to rent a one-bedroom apartment going for about $1,500 per month while supporting her 70-year-old mother, Herbold now pays a monthly mortgage of $350 for a two-bedroom mobile home and between $600 and $700 per month for space rental at a senior park in east Ventura.
"It's ridiculous to be in your 40s and still have a roommate or live with your parents," she said.
Herbold, a title assistant for a Ventura title escrow company, had hoped to be out of her current living situation after one year, but the rise in rents paired with the mobile home mortgage will keep her there longer than expected.
"I don't see it ending any time soon," she said. "The rents that they're charging here in Ventura, if you could save up enough money — a mortgage is cheaper. Most people are struggling just to pay their rent, so they can't set money aside to pay for a down payment. You're just kind of stuck."