Is Renter Urgency Finally Bouncing Back?

• When users sign up for Apartment List, we ask them, “How important is your move-in date?” on a 1-4 scale. In aggregate, their responses are an indicator of how urgently renters are looking to move.
• Amid a backdrop of high inventory and soft rents, renters appear less urgent in their apartment searches. The share of renters who we classify as “low urgency” has been increasing since 2022 and hit a peak in 2025. But we saw an inflection late last year, which could be an early indicator of conditions beginning to shift.
• Search urgency varies by market, and generally tracks with our other market indicators – we see the lowest urgency in the Sun Belt markets where renters have plentiful options due to a surge of multifamily construction; urgency is higher in the Northeast and Midwest where conditions remain tighter.

The share of renters who are “Just Looking” or “In No Hurry” peaked in 2025

2025 was another slow year for the rental market. Nationwide, rents fell for the third straight year and the multifamily vacancy rate hit the highest level we’ve seen going back to 2017. These soft conditions are largely attributable to a surge of new multifamily units hitting the market in recent years, which are still gradually being absorbed. Given this backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that renters are increasingly taking their time and considering their options.

When renters register for Apartment List, we ask them “How important is your move-in date?” Responses are collected on a 1-4 scale. The exact description corresponding to each rating is as follows, along with the average time from registration to the user’s preferred move-in date (also collected in our registration quiz) for each category:

1. “I’m just looking” – Average 93 days from registration to planned move-in
2. “I want to move but am in no hurry” – Average 84 days from registration to planned move-in
3. “I need to move but can be flexible” – Average 59 days from registration to planned move-in
4. “I’ve got to move!” – Average 45 days from registration to planned move-in

The Apartment List Economics team looks at the aggregate level responses to this question as an indicator of the overall intent and urgency of renters in the market. For the purpose of this analysis, we bucket together the (1) and (2) responses and refer to these as “low urgency,” while the combined (3) and (4) responses are considered “high urgency.”

On average, low urgency renters start their apartment search about three months before their projected move-in date. High urgency renters, on the other hand, are planning to move in about 1.5 months. High urgency renters tend to set higher budgets as well, knowing they have less flexibility when searching for their next home.

Renter urgency varies dependably with the seasonality of the market – in the peak summer moving season, a greater share of users are searching with high urgency, and vice versa for the winter offseason. To remove this seasonal noise, we take a 12-month moving average to show just the underlying long-term trend, independent of the predictable up and down swings from summer to winter.

The chart below shows the share of users searching with low urgency from 2019 to 2025 (use the dropdown bar to find local data for your market):

The national trend shows that urgency is a meaningful indicator of market conditions that tracks well with our other core metrics. In 2020, amid the uncertainty of the shelter-in-place phase of the pandemic, the share of low-urgency searches spiked. Then, from 2021 to 2022, when rent growth was skyrocketing and the vacancy rate was tightening, renters felt the pressure to approach their searches with more urgency. But over the past three years, we’ve seen increasingly less urgency, as a surge of multifamily construction has caused rents to fall and vacant units to become plentiful.

The share of users searching with low urgency hit a peak of 54.4 percent last September, up from a low of 46.8 percent in early to mid-2022, and surpassing the 2020 peak of 52.1 percent. It seems that renters are responding to soft market conditions by taking their time and evaluating their options. In recent years, it’s increasingly been the case that property owners are competing for renters to fill their units rather than the other way around. Interestingly though, we saw an inflection point late last year. The share of renters searching with low urgency fell in the last three months of 2025, dipping from 54.4 percent in September to 53.8 percent in December.

Renters feel the least urgency in the softest markets

In addition to the trend over time, renter urgency also varies meaningfully across markets. The chart below shows the low urgency search share as of December 2025 for each of the nation’s 25 largest metros, ranked from lowest to highest:

The ordering of markets here tracks with our broader sense of local market conditions. The San Antonio metro ranks first, where 58.6 percent of Apartment List users are searching with low urgency. This makes sense given that San Antonio is currently one of the nation’s softest rental markets; rents there are down 4.7 percent over the past year – the fifth sharpest decline of large metros nationally – and the metro’s vacancy rate is currently 9.5 percent, well above the national average of 7.3 percent. Other markets with low urgency are also experiencing soft market conditions driven by booming supply growth (e.g. Denver, Phoenix).

At the other end, the Chicago metro has the lowest low urgency share at 50.5 percent. Chicago also ranks #6 for fastest year-over-year rent growth at +4.3 percent, and the multifamily vacancy rate there is just 5.2 percent. We also tend to see higher urgency throughout the Northeast markets (e.g. Boston; New York; Washington, D.C.) where construction has been slow and conditions have remained tighter. These geographic variations in renter behavior show that renters have an awareness of market conditions, even at the outset of their rental search.

A sign of things to come?

In early 2026 rents are still falling, and the national vacancy rate is still increasing. In other words, our core indicators are not yet showing any shift in the soft conditions that have characterized the rental market for the past few years. But the construction boom is now past its peak, and the number of new units hitting the market has slowed considerably. With fewer options and deals available from new properties in their lease-up phases, renters may be starting to feel just a bit more pressure; the recent increase in urgency could be a leading indicator for tightening conditions to come later this year.