Renters are flooding the suburbs where they can't afford to buy homes

Renting is taking off in the suburbs as homeownership remains out of reach for many would-be buyers

Renting is taking off in the suburbs as homeownership remains out of reach for many would-be buyers.

Between 2018 and 2023, rentership surged by at least 5 percentage points in 11 out of 20 suburbs surrounding the largest U.S. metro areas, according to a recent analysis by Point2Homes, a rental market research company.

During the same period, 15 suburbs went from being predominantly composed of homeowners to majority-renter communities. The trend spans fast-growing Sun Belt metros like Dallas, Houston and Miami as well as Northeastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

In five of those top 20 metro areas — Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, Tampa and Baltimore — the suburbs are gaining renters faster than the urban centers they surround, Point2Homes found. The share of residents who rent surged in the Dallas suburbs by 17.6% from 2018 to 2023, while that rate rose just 7.9% in the city itself — with the nearby suburbs of Frisco, McKinney and Grand Prairie each gaining over 5,000 renter households apiece during that period.

Back in 2018, it was harder to buy a home in Dallas County, where most of the city sits, than it was in the metro area’s more suburban counties, like those including Frisco, McKinney and Grand Prairie — suburbs where the ranks of renters have swelled faster than virtually anywhere else, Point2Homes found. That’s no longer the case: Homebuying is now more difficult in the suburban counties surrounding Dallas than it is in Dallas County itself, the NBC News Home Buyer Index shows.