This is very surprising to me. When the home sales market drops, more people rent out their old home instead of selling it at a loss, hoping that the prices will rise soon. This causes the rent prices to drop. This is what I saw a few months ago when I considered renting out my house. Perhaps I need to check the prices again.
Rising rents mean that the gap between rents and mortgage payments is narrowing. That will tend to slow the decline of home prices.
"Rents hit a national average of $1,319 by December, up from $1,181 in January 2010, according to HotPads.com. The figures were calculated from a sample of one million active rental prices on the website."
Someone generated a statistic based on an arbitrary data source and posted it on the internet. It must be true!
The stats were aggregated from every rental listed on hotpads during 2010. At any given time there are half a million rentals listed, some of which have multiple vacancies (large buildings), thus the million prices.