Helping the City and residents understand the local rental market

Every year the City of Santa Barbara publishes data on rental housing listings across Santa Barbara County’s southern coast, including the cities and communities of Goleta, Isla Vista, Santa Barbara, Montecito, Summerland, and Carpinteria. The purpose of the survey is to provide the City and its residents a summary of the local private rental housing market and how it is changing over time. For the 2020 analysis, the City outsourced this work to RDN, leveraging our local and rental housing analysis expertise.

RDN worked with the City to follow the methodology used in previous studies and perform the analysis in compliance with the ordinance. To conduct the survey, we compiled a list of all rental housing listings in the South Coast for the month of April, 2020, removing duplicate listings and listings for subleases, shared housing (rooms), and furnished rentals. To collect these data, RDN used a data feed that includes over a million rental listing across the country each week and listings from the classified advertisements for two local newspapers: the Santa Barbara News Press and Santa Barbara Independent.

We provided the City with a final report, detailing the results of the survey and subsequent analysis. The analysis included a calculation of affordability, median prices, and information used to calculate benefits under the City’s Tenant Displacement Assistance Ordinance.

The published report is available on the City’s website.