Rent prices have dipped nationally for two straight months, falling 0.7% during the month of October.
That’s according to Apartment List’s national rent report index and marks the second straight month-over-month decline. It also marks the largest single-month dip in the history of the index, going back to 2017. The national rent index is down by 1.1% since August.
These past two months have marked a rapid cooldown in the market, but the timing of that cooldown is consistent with a seasonal trend that was typical in pre-pandemic years.
Despite the monthly decline, rent growth over the course of this year continues to outpace the pre-pandemic trend, even as it has slowed significantly from last year’s peaks. So far in 2022 rents are up by a total of 5.9%, compared to 18% at this point in 2021.
Last October, rents increased by 0.8% month-over-month, as the market continued on an unprecedented stretch of record-setting rent growth which disrupted seasonal trends. This October’s record-setting decline marks a rapid cooldown which may signal that we’re entering a new phase of the rental market.
Bottoming out at 4.1% in October 2021, the national vacancy index has been on a trend of gradual easing. From April through August of this year, the vacancy index ticked up by just 0.2 percentage points, from 5.1% to 5.3%. From August through October, it increased by 0.4 percentage points, hitting 5.5% this month.
Rents decreased this month in 89 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, while an additional two cities saw rents hold steady, and only nine cities saw increases. And nearly across the board, local rent growth has cooled down since last year – 96 of the top 100 cities have seen slower year-to-date rent growth in 2022 than they did over the same months of 2021.
The largest city-level decline this month was in Boise, ID, where rents fell by 3.5% from September to October. Boise was an early poster child for pandemic-era rent disruption, with prices there peaking in August 2021 with rents up by a staggering 46.5% from their March 2020 level.
