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Apartment Occupancy Just Hit a Historic High. Is That Good?

There’s a silver lining to astronomic U.S. rent hikes: Most tenants won’t pay them, because they’re already locked into their leases.

A pedestrian walks by a "for rent" sign in front of an apartment building in San Francisco, where prices have surged back to pre-pandemic levels. 

A pedestrian walks by a "for rent" sign in front of an apartment building in San Francisco, where prices have surged back to pre-pandemic levels. 

Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America
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Apartment occupancy in the U.S. has hit an all-time high, meaning anyone looking for a new place is going to have a rough time of it.

Fully 97.5% of professionally managed apartment units are spoken for as of December, the highest figure on record, according to data from the property management software company RealPage. That’s more than 2 percentage points higher than the occupancy rate in December 2020, a difference that represents hundreds of thousands of households.