Renters Are Finally Catching a Break
After 18 months of blistering growth, cooling demand in the housing market is forcing landlords to tone down their pricing.
Apartment rents are coming down.
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP
There's a new twist in the fast-moving housing market with welcome news for renters: After an 18-month period of red-hot rent growth, the apartment market has turned ice cold over the past few months. It's another area of the economy that's in the process of unwinding after experiencing an unsustainable boom in activity and price growth during the pandemic. And that's good news for everyone (unless you're a landlord).
There was evidence a couple months ago as pricing cooled that something was changing in the rental market. At the time it was hard to tell whether this was just normalization after a period of elevated growth, or if normalization would give way to weakness. Two months later it's clear that we're seeing real sluggishness rather than just the softness you would expect at a seasonally slower time of the year.