Renting in McColl? Here's What You Need to Know Before You Sign

McColl Rental Market Overview

McColl is a 1.05-square-mile town in Marlboro County's Pee Dee region, about 8 miles from the North Carolina border. No apartment complex, subsidized housing community, or individually listed rental confirmed to sit inside McColl town limits was found publishing an asking rent as of September 2026. In place of a property-level figure, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimates -- aggregated by city-data.com for 2024 -- put the town's own median gross rent at $491 a month, against a median household income the same aggregator lists at $27,801 (DataUSA's own pull of similar data lists $26,638 instead, a roughly 4% gap that reflects how much these estimates can move for a town of only 776 households). Both aggregators agree closely on one figure: 41.9% of McColl residents live below the poverty line. A more unusual data point for a town this size is the homeownership rate -- DataUSA lists it at 45.5%, meaning a majority of McColl's occupied housing is renter-occupied rather than owner-occupied, the opposite of what's typical in a small rural South Carolina town.

Common Lease Terms in McColl

With no confirmed apartment community or individually listed rental operating inside McColl, terms here have to be pieced together from Census housing data rather than a single property's published lease:

• City-data.com's 2024 aggregation lists a mean detached-house value of $110,773 alongside a mean mobile-home value of $93,187 -- the two figures sit close together, consistent with mobile and manufactured homes making up a meaningful share of McColl's housing stock rather than a marginal one
• DataUSA's homeownership estimate of 45.5% means renter-occupied units outnumber owner-occupied ones in McColl, even though no single landlord, property manager, or apartment brand publishes a lease template or rent schedule online
• Median gross rent is estimated at $491 a month (city-data.com, 2024) -- a town-wide statistical average across all renter-occupied units, not a quoted price for any specific unit or address
• The two McColl addresses checked against the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder for this guide -- Town Hall (210 E Gibson Ave) and 301 N Marlboro St -- both resolve cleanly inside the incorporated Town of McColl, so a McColl-addressed lease in the town center isn't a jurisdiction question so much as a pricing-transparency one

Local Tenant Protections

South Carolina law provides the baseline for tenant rights, but McColl may have additional local ordinances that affect your lease.

• South Carolina law preempts local rent control statewide (S.C. Code §27-39-60) -- no South Carolina city or county, including McColl, may enact an ordinance regulating the rent charged on privately owned residential property
• This guide could not locate a codified Town of McColl ordinance on Municode, eCode360, American Legal, or a town website as of September 2026, so no town-specific rental-registration or landlord-licensing provision could be confirmed or ruled out
• Both in-town addresses checked against the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder for this guide -- Town Hall (210 E Gibson Ave) and 301 N Marlboro St -- resolved to McColl town rather than unincorporated Marlboro County, so questions about which government has jurisdiction inside the town center are more settled here than the ordinance-text question itself
• Absent a locatable town code, South Carolina's statewide Residential Landlord and Tenant Act is the only confirmed baseline for an ordinary rental inside McColl

For full South Carolina statewide tenant rights, see our South Carolina tenant rights guide.

Mandatory Fees in McColl

No apartment community or individually confirmed rental operating inside McColl publishes a fee schedule online, as of September 2026.

• No application fee, pet fee, administrative fee, or security deposit amount could be confirmed for any specific McColl address, since no rental community identified inside town limits maintains a public listing or website
• South Carolina law sets no statutory cap on application fees, pet fees, or administrative fees -- whatever a specific lease states is what governs
• South Carolina's statewide security deposit rules (no cap on the amount, 30 days to return it after move-out) apply by default in the absence of any McColl-specific ordinance

A town this size having no published fee schedule isn't automatically a red flag -- but it does mean getting any application fee, deposit amount, or pet fee confirmed in writing before applying is the only way to know the real move-in cost at a specific McColl address.

Population Decline, Pee Dee Tribal History, and McColl's Local Economy

McColl was founded in 1884 and named for D.D. McColl, a local businessman; its early economy ran on cotton cultivation, lumbering, and turpentine production, the same extractive rural-Carolina economy documented across much of the Pee Dee region at the time. The town's population has fallen in every Census count since 1990: 2,685 in 1990, 2,498 in 2000, 2,174 in 2010, and 2,070 in 2020 -- a 22.9% drop over three decades, including a 4.8% drop in the most recent decade alone. Unlike some other small South Carolina towns this guide has checked, where a single institutional population (a federal prison's group-quarters count, for instance) can make a headline percentage misleading, McColl's decline shows up steadily across four consecutive counts with no single documented event -- no prison population shift, no dated mass plant closure -- identified in public sources to explain it. It reads instead as the same slow, broad-based population loss recorded across much of South Carolina's rural Pee Dee region, where agricultural and manufacturing employment has contracted over decades. City-data.com's own 2024 estimate puts McColl's population even lower, at 1,976, suggesting the decline has continued past the 2020 Census count.

McColl has also served as the governmental seat of the state-recognized Pee Dee Indian Tribe since 1976. The tribe, with roughly 200 enrolled members, began work on the Pee Dee Tribal Mounds on tribal land in 2017, per Wikipedia's Marlboro County article -- a cultural and civic identity distinct from the town's economic base. On the employment side, manufacturing is McColl's largest industry by a wide margin: DataUSA's estimate counts 170 of the town's 556 employed residents in manufacturing, more than education (131) and administrative support (46) combined, and city-data.com separately lists manufacturing at 30.4% of the workforce -- both consistent with the surrounding county's own profile, where manufacturing accounts for roughly 30% of employment countywide. Marlboro County's own largest employers as of April 2024 were the U.S. Department of Justice, Domtar, Food Lion, Domino's, and Walmart -- but the two largest of those, the federal Bureau of Prisons facility and Domtar's Marlboro Mill paper plant at 585 Willamette Road, are both sited in Bennettsville, the county seat, roughly 20 miles away, not in McColl itself. That pattern -- a county's marquee employers anchored in its seat rather than its smaller towns -- shows up elsewhere in this guide's South Carolina research too, and it means McColl's own in-town job base looks thinner than the countywide manufacturing share alone would suggest.

Common Issues Renters Face in McColl

These are the most frequent considerations this guide's research turned up for renters in McColl:

• No apartment community or individually listed rental confirmed inside McColl publishes pricing, so comparing "McColl rent" to a neighboring town's published figures isn't possible from public sources alone -- only the town-wide ACS estimate ($491/month median gross rent) exists, and that's an average, not a specific quote
• Two current aggregators disagree by a meaningful margin on McColl's own income and population figures (median household income $27,801 vs. $26,638; population 1,976 vs. the 2020 Census's 2,070), a reminder that small-town ACS estimates carry a wide margin of error and shouldn't be read as precise
• McColl's population decline is real and multi-decade, not a one-cycle artifact -- worth knowing before assuming a single percentage tells the whole story, the way it sometimes doesn't in other small South Carolina towns this guide has checked
• Being roughly 8 miles from the North Carolina border doesn't put any address actually inside McColl town limits into another state or into unincorporated county land -- both in-town addresses checked for this guide resolved cleanly to McColl town
• A majority of McColl's occupied housing is renter- rather than owner-occupied per DataUSA's 45.5% homeownership estimate, yet no landlord or property manager in town maintains a public-facing rental listing, which is an unusual combination worth confirming directly rather than assuming a listing exists somewhere online

Negotiating Your Lease in McColl

South Carolina is landlord-favorable with minimal statutory protections, and McColl's rental market has no independently published property-level price to benchmark against.

• A written rent, deposit, and fee quote directly from a specific landlord or property owner is more attainable to obtain than a comparable public listing, since no rental community identified inside McColl maintains one
• Checking a quoted figure against the town's own $491 ACS-estimated median gross rent, while keeping in mind that figure is a town-wide average rather than a per-unit quote, is a reasonable gut-check before signing
• Confirming a specific parcel's jurisdiction against the U.S. Census Bureau's free public geocoder is commonly done before assuming which government's rules apply, given no McColl town ordinance could be located
• Comparing a McColl quote against nearby Bennettsville or Cheraw, both larger Marlboro-area or Pee Dee-region markets with more independently published pricing, can help gauge whether a specific figure is reasonable for the area

A town with no independently verifiable rental pricing isn't automatically a red flag in a market this thin -- but it does mean every figure needs confirming directly with the landlord or property owner before signing anything.