Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter, sent every weekday morning.In Nashville, Tenn., the landlords come to you.At least, it looked that way from the texts showing up on Mason Comans' phone a few months ago when he was apartment hunting.One property manager wrote that they were offering one month of free rent.
Another offered two."I even saw some places doing three months, three and a half months free," Comans said.This is what a renter's market looks like, said Zillow senior economist Kara Ng: "Renters, this is your year."The typical asking price for rent nationally is now rising slower than wages and inflation — 1.9% year over year in April, according to Zillow.By contrast, the latest inflation report, in May, showed that consumer prices more broadly were up 4.2% compared with a year ago.Figures from Realtor.com say rent has actually gone down 1.5% year over year.
And Ng added that a record 39.8% of rentals on Zillow offered move-in incentives in April, from waived fees to a month or more of free rent.An extra few thousand dollars from move-in concessions is a sizable cushion for American families that are being squeezed on other expenses, such as power bills and gasoline."Rent is the place giving you that breathing room," Ng said.But as with all things real estate, there's one really big caveat when it comes to rent prices: location.
Just how good renters have it depends on where they live.The reason rent increases have fallen behind inflation comes down to Economics 101: supply and demand.Specifically, the supply of apartments has been boosted by a construction boom.
In 2024, the U.S.built some 600,000 apartment units, the most in 38 years.All that extra supply has outpaced demand.
The rental vacancy rate was at 7.3% at the start of the year, the highest it has been in a dozen years.But that supply of new housing isn't evenly distributed throughout the nation.Sun Belt cities, in particular, caught the construction bug.
That's why many apartment m...