Best Cities to Rent with Pets

Happy National Pet Day! We hope you get to spend some quality time with your, or your friends’, pets today. To celebrate, we wanted to find the top cities to rent with your furry friends. Taking into consideration our user behaviors, like how many people are searching with the pet-friendly filter, the number of vets and parks per capita, and the density of pet-friendly listings per city, we were able to create a national ranking of the best cities to rent with pets.

Arizona, California, and Colorado cities topped our ranking, though Oklahoma and Wisconsin cities made it onto the top 5 as well. The west coast and midwest dominated the top 10 with Florida making an appearance for the South as 9th.

1. Scottsdale, AZ topped our list as the best city to rent with pets. Ranking especially high in vets and parks per capita and number of users who searched with Zumper’s pet-friendly filter, this city was catapulted to the top. Scottsdale really seems to have great amenities for their pets and lots of renters apartment-hunting with their furry friends.

2. Anaheim, CA ranked as the second best city, driven up by the large densities of vets and parks per capita, as it actually ranked as #1 for the number of vets category!

3. Colorado Springs, CO was third overall, though it actually ranked the highest for the city with the most Zumper users searching for apartments with the pet-friendly filter. This just means there are tons of pets and pet owners to meet and become friends there.

4. Tulsa, OK was one of the top 3 cities for percentage of pet-friendly listings on Zumper’s platform, which was a main factor in why it was on our top 5 overall. Tulsa also had a large number of users searching with the pet-friendly filter as well, which goes hand in hand with the large number of pet-friendly listings.

5. Madison, WI, similar to Tulsa, ranked especially high in number of users searching with the pet-friendly filter and in the number of pet-friendly listings on our platform. These two factors coupled together pushed this city to rank as our fifth best city.

Full Data

Methodology

To determine the best cities for renting with pets, we analyzed data from top 100 U.S. cities on four key metrics. These metrics included:

•     % of users who clicked on the “Pet-Friendly” filter by city on Zumper.com
•     % of pet-friendly listings by city on Zumper.com
•     Parks per capita – population data from the 2016 American Community Survey; parks data from Yelp.com
•     Vets per capita – population data from the 2016 American Community Survey; vets data from Yelp.com

Each city then received a rank for each metric and then a weighted score for each metric. The final ranking was determined by adding up each city’s weighted scores to see who scored highest overall.

This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.