Sky high rent is a part of life in the Bay Area and the trend is now hitting the Sacramento region.
Rent Jungle, an online search engine for rental housing, marked the average rent price in Sacramento for January 2017 at $1,346.
And rent prices in the Capitol City show no signs of dipping down any time soon.
In fact, Yardi Matrix, an online apartment market data source, recently reported rent in Sacramento is forecasted to rise another 9.6 percent in 2017.
Bay area residents are moving to other cities seeking more affordable living and are often blamed as the reason Sacramento is seeing high rent prices.
But are former Bay Area residents rightfully taking the heat for Sacramento's new rent woes?
While it may be true Sacramento is the cheaper alternative to the Bay Area, there is actually no hard data proving a correlation between Sacramento's rent prices and Bay Area transplants.
In fact, the main factor for rising rent is lack of new housing units, according to several rental market sources, including Yardi Matrix.
Sacramento construction costs are similar to the Bay Area. The city is also known to have high barriers to development and a lengthy approval process for a new product, making it more difficult to build and meet demand in the area.
Sacramento added 852 units in 2016, an expansion rate of 0.7 percent. The completion rate is well below the national average and is not expected to pick up the pace. Only 1,600 units are underway in Sacramento, according to Yardi Matrix. Since construction is limited in the near future, occupancy is expected to reach 96.6 percent, placing vacancy at a low.
Additionally, the city added more than 24,000 jobs last year, up 2.6 percent which is above the national average. Sacramento has also seen investment value with the addition of the Golden 1 Center and new projects underway in the surrounding downtown area.
As more jobs pop up, so do more people.
The Sacramento region has seen a boost in population over the past few years.
A California Department of Finance report released this week found Yolo County is the fastest growing county in the state. Placer County ranks third and Sacramento is number eight on the list of top ten fastest growing counties in California.
Sacramento's population has grown by 100,000 since 2011, according to the Yardi Matrix report. Between 2014 and 2015, the metro grew by 1.3 percent, well above the national average of 08 percent.
Bay Area residents moving to Sacramento are likely contributing to the population influx in the region. In fact, the City of Trees was the top search for people living in the Bay Area looking to pack their moving boxes, according to a 2016 Redfin report.
However, just because there are Bay Area transplants moving to Sacramento, it doesn't make the new residents the sole culprits for the high rent prices the city is experiencing.
It's safe to say, low supply and high demand is what's lighting the rental market on fire.