Apartment List National Rent Report

• The national median rent dipped by 0.2% in August, and now stands at $1,400. This was the first month-over-month decline since January, and marks the beginning of the rental market’s off-season. It’s likely that we’ll continue to see further modest rent declines through the remainder of the year.
• Rent prices nationally are down 0.9% compared to one year ago. Year-over-year rent growth has ticked further negative for four consecutive months and is now at its lowest level since December 2023.
• The national multifamily vacancy rate now sits at 7.1%, record high for our index. We're past the peak of a multifamily construction surge, but a healthy supply of new units are still hitting the market, and vacancies are still trending up.
• Units are taking an average of 29 days to get leased after being listed, up one day from last month’s reading, and down from a high of 37 days in January.
• The Austin metro currently has the softest conditions among the nation’s large rental markets, with the median rent there down by 6.6% over the past year. At the other end of the spectrum, the San Francisco metro has seen the fastest year-over-year rent growth (+4.7%).

Rents down 0.2% month-over-month, down 0.9% year-over-year

The national median rent dipped by 0.2 percent in August, the first monthly decline since January. This marks the end of the busy season for moving activity, and it’s likely that rent prices nationally will continue to decline through the fall and winter, when fewer renters are typically looking for apartments.

Monthly rent growth peaked at +0.6 percent in March this year, and then began to gradually trend down during the peak moving months, when rent growth is normally fastest. The flip to negative month-over-month growth has also come a bit earlier than what we saw in pre-pandemic years, although this is now the third straight year that prices have begun to dip in August.

This month’s decline was slightly more pronounced than what we saw in August of last year, and as a result, year-over-year rent growth dipped this month, falling to -0.9 percent. From last October through this April, year-over-year rent growth nationally gradually ticked up from -0.8 percent to -0.3 percent, and appeared to be on the path to flipping positive for the first time since mid-2023. However, that rebound reversed over the summer; year-over-year growth nationally has dipped further negative for four consecutive months, and is now at the lowest level since December 2023.

In dollar terms, the national median monthly rent now stands at $1,400, down $12 compared to August 2024. With the overall trajectory of rents trending modestly downward in recent years, the national median rent has now fallen below its August 2022 peak by a total of 2.9 percent, or $42 per month. But that cooldown came following a period of record-setting rent growth, and the typical rent price remains 22 percent higher than its January 2021 level.

Multifamily vacancy rate hits 7.1%, a new peak

The most important driver behind the soft rent growth of recent years has been a historic surge of multifamily construction. 2024 saw over 600 thousand new multifamily units hit the market, representing a 65 percent increase compared to 2022 and the most new supply in a single year since 1986. We’re now past the peak of that supply wave, but there remain a significant number of units still in the construction pipeline. 243 thousand multifamily units were completed in the first half of this year – that’s down 27 percent from the second half of 2024, but still 31 percent higher than the 10-year average for first half completions.

As a result of all this new inventory, more vacant units are sitting on the market, meaning that property owners face more competition for renters and have less pricing leverage. Our national vacancy index – which measures the average vacancy rate of stabilized properties in our marketplace – currently sits at 7.1 percent. This represents an all-time high for this data series, which goes back to the start of 2017. Conditions are still expected to tighten later this year and into next as the supply wave continues to recede, but for now the market is still absorbing a swell of new units.

List-to-Lease time ticks up for first time this year

As more vacant units have come onto the market, those units have also been sitting vacant for somewhat longer. Our time on market index tells us how long it takes for vacant units to get leased after they are first listed on our platform. The typical “list-to-lease” time peaked at 37 days nationally in January, an all-time high going back to the start of the data series in 2019. We have since come down from that peak, but August saw time on market tick up for the second consecutive month, increasing from 28 days in June to 29 days this month.

The increasing list-to-lease time that we’ve seen since recently is in line with the transition to negative rent growth as we enter the market’s off-season. But in addition to that seasonal trend, units are also sitting a bit longer than they typically do at this time of year, a signal of market softness in line with our rent growth and vacancy estimates. The median time on market nationally is currently two days longer than at this time last year, and units are sitting for 11 days longer than they were in August 2021 when the market was at its tightest.

New supply driving falling rents in Sun Belt markets while the Bay Area heats up

Rents declined month-over-month in 33 of the nation’s 54 large metropolitan areas with a population of over one million. On a year-over-year basis, meanwhile, these markets are evenly split between those where rents are rising and those where rents are falling. Rent trends vary significantly by region, with year-over-year declines currently concentrated in the South and Mountain West regions.

Austin has seen the nation’s sharpest decline among large metros – the metro-wide median rent has fallen 6.6 percent in the last 12 months and is down 18% from its 2022 peak. The Austin metro is also significant for permitting new homes at the fastest pace of any large metro in the country, indicating the impact of new supply on softening rents. Austin is not alone in exhibiting this trend; among the ten metros with sharpest year-over-year rent declines, many also rank among the highest in terms of multifamily permitting activity (e.g. Denver, Phoenix, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Dallas). Notably almost all of these markets are located in the Sun Belt.

At the other end of the spectrum, the San Francisco metro currently has the nation’s fastest rent growth, with a 4.7 percent increase over the past year. The fastest growth in the San Francisco metro is happening in the urban core; the city of San Francisco has seen prices spike by a staggering 11.5 percent over the past year. Nearby San Jose is also among the top five for metro-level rent growth (+3.3 percent). Despite the recent strengthening of rent growth in the Bay Area, the region has been the slowest to bounce back from pandemic declines; in fact, we estimate that rents in the San Francisco metro are only just now surpassing their early-2020 level. The remainder of the top ten list for fastest rent growth is comprised primarily of markets across the Midwest (e.g. Chicago and Minneapolis) and East Coast (e.g. Providence, RI and Virginia Beach, VA ).

Conclusion

All of our key indicators are pointing toward ongoing sluggishness in the multifamily rental market – rent growth is slipping and the vacancy rate is at an all-time high. A return to tighter market conditions remains on the horizon, but the outlook has been complicated by a continued influx of new units to the market and macroeconomic whiplash being caused by tariffs and other policies being pursued by the Trump administration. With construction expected to slow further in the second half of this year and into 2026, conditions are likely to shift, but it will still take time for the market to metabolize the recent growth in the rental stock.

Complete Data and Methodology

All of the underlying data presented in this report is freely available on our rental data download page, where you can find the full monthly history of our rent estimates, vacancy index, and time on market index at various geographic levels (national, state, metro, county, and city).

Apartment List has long been committed to making our data products as accurate and transparent as possible. For those interested in getting deeper in the technical weeds, please see our rent estimate methodology explainer and vacancy index methodology explainer. And if you have any questions or custom data requests, you can reach us at research@apartmentlist.com.