Apartment List National Rent Report

Overview

Welcome to the October 2024 Apartment List National Rent Report. The national median rent dipped by 0.5% in September, as we turn the corner into the slow season for the rental market. The median rent nationally now stands at $1,405, and we’re likely to see that number continue to dip modestly through the remainder of the year.

Since the second half of 2022, the seasonal declines in rent prices that take place during the fall and winter have been steeper than usual and seasonal increases of the spring and summer have been more mild. As a result, apartments are on average slightly cheaper today than they were one year ago. Year-over-year rent growth nationally currently stands at -0.7 percent and has now been in negative territory for over a year and a half. Despite this, the national median rent is still more than $200 per month higher than it was just a few years ago.

On the supply side of the rental market, our national vacancy index remains slightly elevated, currently standing at 6.7 percent. After a historic tightening in 2021, multifamily occupancy has been slowly but consistently easing for over two years. And with 2024 bringing the most new apartment completions in decades, we expect that there will continue to be an abundance of vacant units on the market in the year ahead.

Zooming in to the local level, 80 of the nation’s 100 largest cities saw rents fall in September, in line with the broader national trend. And on a year-over-year basis, rent growth is negative for 51 of these cities. Many of the steepest year-over-year declines remain concentrated in Sun Belt metros that are rapidly expanding their multifamily inventory, such as Austin (-7.2 percent year-over-year), Raleigh (-4.8 percent), and Jacksonville (-4.3 percent).

Rents are down 0.5% month-over-month, down 0.7% year-over-year

Rent growth follows a seasonal pattern – prices tend to go up during the spring and summer and dip during the fall and winter. We have now transitioned between those seasons – August saw month-over-month rent growth flip from slightly positive to slightly negative, and now September has brought a second, sharper monthly decline. We are likely to see continued price dips of increasing magnitude in the coming months, as property owners offer modest discounts to fill vacancies during a time of year when fewer renters are looking to move.

Interestingly, the timing of rental market seasonality has shifted slightly in the past two years. The fastest month-over-month rent growth occurred in March both this year and last, two months earlier than what was typical in pre-pandemic years. And monthly growth has flipped negative in August for the past two years, which is earlier than we normally expect. This slight shift in timing seems to largely reflect the ongoing sluggishness in the market. As an influx of new supply has collided with softer demand over the past two years, rents have increased only modestly during the peak moving season, and have seen more pronounced dips during the off-season.

As a result, year-over-year rent growth nationally has been in negative territory since June 2023, and currently stands at -0.7 percent. In other words, the national median rent today is $10 per month cheaper than it was one year ago. But even though rent prices have been trending down for some time, the national median rent is just a few percentage points below its August 2022 peak, but still more than 20 percent higher than it was at the start of 2021.

Rent CPI remains elevated, but is no longer a blocker for the Fed

The primary measure of inflation in the United States is the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is heavily influenced by changes in housing prices.¹ The Apartment List National Rent Index has proven to be a strong leading indicator of the CPI housing and rent components (collectively referred to as “shelter”), since our index captures price changes in new leases, which are only later reflected in price changes across all leases (what the CPI measures).

Because of these methodological differences, when our index peaked with record-setting rent growth in late 2021, the CPI’s measure of housing cost inflation was still in the early stages of its upswing. And while rent growth as measured by our index was cooling over the course of 2022, the CPI measure continued to rise. But as our index had predicted, the shelter component of CPI turned the corner last spring and has been steadily cooling off ever since.

But despite the progress, shelter CPI remains elevated and is one of the key factors continuing to exert upward pressure on topline CPI. In fact, if you strip out shelter, the remainder of the CPI price basket increased by just 1.1 percent year-over-year, well below the Fed’s long-term 2 percent inflation target. As shelter inflation continues to trend down, it will help overall inflation continue to ease as well, but it will still take time for shelter CPI to fully metabolize the shock to market rents.

However, the Fed understands that shelter CPI captures real-time changes in the housing market gradually and with a lengthy lag, and they’re no longer waiting for shelter CPI to come down before shifting course in the inflation fight. In their September meeting, the Fed cut interest rates for the first time since they began fighting inflation. And that cut was a full half percentage point, indicating that the Fed may be more worried about signs of a slowing labor market than it is about lingering remnants of inflation. We’ll be continuing to keep a close eye on the official measures of housing inflation, but the Fed’s actions indicate that elevated shelter CPI is no longer a blocker to rate cuts.

Apartment vacancies remain elevated

The rapid price fluctuations that have defined the rental market over the past three years are largely attributable to changes in the balance between the number of vacant apartments available (supply) and the number of renters looking to move into them (demand). Early in the pandemic, the Apartment List Vacancy Index rose to 6.8 percent as many Americans consolidated households and moved in with family amid large job losses and economic uncertainty. Then, a suddenly tight rental market drove rapid rent growth in 2021 and 2022 as more households competed for a dwindling supply of vacant units. Our vacancy index tightened from 6.8 percent to 3.8 percent in just over a year.

But after bottoming out in October 2021, vacancies have been opening up steadily for over two years. As of September, our vacancy index sits at 6.7 percent, the highest level since August 2020. And there’s good reason to expect that it could rise even further during the remainder of the year. Despite a recent slowdown in new building permits being issued and new construction projects breaking ground, the number of multifamily units under construction remains near record levels. 2023 saw the most new apartments complete construction in more than 30 years, and an even greater number of new units are expected to come on the market this year. This means that renters should have more available options than they have in some time, especially in the Sun Belt markets where construction activity has been strongest.

Vacancy trends are highly localized, and they have been a key indicator of rapidly evolving conditions in local markets across the U.S. throughout the pandemic. To explore the topic in greater detail, monthly vacancy data are now available for download for hundreds of cities, metros, and states, and can be easily linked to our existing rent estimates using Federal Information Processing System (FIPS) codes.

Rents are down month-over-month in 80 of 100 largest cities, down year-over-year in 51

The chart below visualizes monthly rent changes in each of the nation’s 100 largest cities from January 2019 to present. The color in each cell represents the extent to which prices went up (red) or down (blue) in a given city in a given month. We see a typical seasonal pattern in 2019, followed by 2020, where horizontal bands of dark blue represent steep rent drops in some of the nation’s largest and most expensive cities. Meanwhile, the dark red bands in 2021 and 2022 represent the rent heatwave that drove up prices nationwide. But the right side of the chart shows a strong cooldown in late 2022 and only modest rent growth in the two summers that follow. Rent growth was negative in September 2024 in the majority of large cities across the country; 80 of the nation’s largest 100 cities saw prices fall month-over-month.

Rents are also down year-over-year in just over half of these cities, a massive deceleration from mid-2022, when all 100 were posting positive annual growth. As the market cooled and many regions experienced back-to-back slow winter seasons, an increasing number of cities saw annual rent change flip negative. Today, the median rent is cheaper than it was one year ago in 51 of the 100 largest cities. Most of these cities are concentrated in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and along the West Coast. In contrast, many large cities in the Midwest and Northeast are still experiencing positive annual rent growth.

New supply driving falling rents in Sun Belt markets while Midwest and Northeast maintain positive growth

The prevalence of year-over-year rent declines in Sun Belt markets can be clearly seen in the metro-level map below. The Austin metro has seen the nation’s sharpest decline among large metros, with prices there down 7.2 percent in the last 12 months. The Austin metro is also significant for permitting new homes at the fastest pace of any large metro in the country, signaling the important role new supply plays in managing long-term affordability. 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. Nashville, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio). Notably all of these markets are located in the Sun Belt.

At the other end of the spectrum, the fastest rent growth has been occurring in metros across the Midwestern and Northeastern United States. These are markets where steady rental demand is not being matched by supply growth. On the list of markets with the fastest rent growth the Midwest is represented by Cleveland, Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Milwaukee, while the Northeast is represented by Hartford and Washington, D.C. Note, however, that even the markets topping the list are mostly experiencing fairly modest rent growth. Only two large metro (Tulsa and Cleveland) have seen rents rise by more than 5 percent over the past year.

Conclusion

With September’s 0.5 percent decrease, we have officially entered the off-season for the rental market, and rents should continue to dip for the remainder of the year. Year-over-year rent growth also continues to indicate a sluggish market, remaining negative at -0.7 percent. Rent increases are currently being moderated by a robust construction pipeline expected to deliver a decades-high number of new apartment units in 2024. And while rental demand has bounced back a bit this year, recent signs of labor market softness could dampen demand going forward. With this in mind, we expect that new supply will continue to outstrip demand into 2025.

For more detailed data, see the table below, which contains the most recent estimates for the nation’s 100 largest cities. And for complete data, see our rental data download page, where you can download the full history of our monthly estimates going back to 2017 at various geographic levels (national, state, metro, county, and city). And as always, feel free to contact us with any questions.

A Note on Our Methodology

Apartment List has long been committed to making our data products as accurate and transparent as possible. Our rent estimates and vacancy index are calculated as follows:

Rent Estimates: We estimate rent growth using a same-unit approach that controls for compositional changes in the rental stock. We also control for price fluctuations that arise over the course of a vacancy by identifying the last available list price before a unit gets rented as a proxy for its transacted price. Finally, we combat luxury bias in our rent data by benchmarking our reported rent levels to fully-representative median rent statistics from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Vacancy Index: Our real-time availability data allows us to calculate a daily vacancy rate for each of our partner properties, which we then average over the course of each month to calculate a monthly rate. Our overall index is an average of these property-level vacancy rates, weighted by the number of units in each property. We restrict our sample to properties that have been on Apartment List for at least six months and that have attained a stabilized vacancy rate of 15% or less.

For those interested in getting deeper in the weeds, please see our rent estimate methodology and vacancy index methodology. And if you have any questions or custom data requests, you can reach us at research@apartmentlist.com.

For more context on local data, check out our market-specific rent reports for the following cities:

• Atlanta, GA
• Austin, TX
• Baltimore, MD
• Boston, MA
• Boulder, CO
• Charlotte, NC
• Chicago, IL
• Cleveland, OH
• Colorado Springs, CO
• Dallas, TX
• Denver, CO
• Detroit, MI
• Fort Collins, CO
• Fort Lauderdale, FL
• Houston, TX
• Indianapolis, IN
• Jacksonville, FL
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Minneapolis, MN
• Nashville, TN
• New Orleans, LA
• New York, NY
• Orlando, FL
• Phoenix, AZ
• Philadelphia, PA
• Raleigh, NC
• San Antonio, TX
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• San Jose, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Tallahassee, FL
• Tampa, FL
• Tucson, AZ
• Washington, DC

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About Apartment List Rent Reports:

Apartment List’s Rent Reports cover rental pricing data in major cities, their suburbs, and their neighborhoods. We provide valuable leading indicators of rental price trends, highlight data on top cities, and identify the key facts renters should know. As always, our goal is to provide price transparency to America’s 105 million renters to help them make the best possible decisions in choosing a place to call home. Apartment List publishes Rent Reports during the first calendar week of each month.