McKinney Tops Renter Rankings Again, South Sweeps the List
McKinney, Texas, just took the crown for the second year running on RentCafe's Best Cities for Renters list, and the South owns the party this year: 37 of the top 50 spots. If you're marketing a property anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line, this is a free press release someone else already wrote for you.
Here's the play. RentCafe built its ranking around affordability and economic opportunity, the same two things every renter in your market is already Googling at 11pm. That means the copy is basically done. Pull your city's ranking and rank change, drop it into an email subject line, put it on a landing page banner, feed it to your social team as a "why we live here" post. This is third-party validation you didn't have to pay a PR firm for, and renters trust a list from RentCafe a lot more than they trust your leasing office's Instagram caption.
Don't stop at bragging rights, though. If your city ranked, say why, in terms your renters actually feel: job growth, commute times, rent-to-income ratio, whatever RentCafe cited. If your city didn't make the cut, don't ignore it. Reframe around whatever you do have, because pretending the list doesn't exist just means your competitor down the street gets to use it instead.
The list refreshes yearly, so the shelf life on this angle is short. Grab it now, while it's still news and not old trivia nobody remembers by Q2.
Source: RentCafe, September 3, 2026
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