Up First
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.
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“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.”
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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 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.
An apartment construction boom
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.
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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 managers in cities like Nashville, Phoenix and Austin, Texas, are more likely to offer perks for new renters.
“There’s a lot of apartment buildings hitting the market all at once,” Ng said. “And property managers are trying to fill it, and they’re doing it with freebies.”
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But ask a Chicago native whether it’s a renter’s market there, and you’ll get a simple answer. “Hell, no,” said Chloe Troub. “I find that to be really insulting, just given the cost, the sheer cost, of putting a roof over your head right now.”
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Troub rents in the Windy City, which has seen some of the largest rent increases in the nation, with rents rising 5.4% year over year in April, according to Zillow. This can also be explained by supply and demand: Too many renters are chasing not-enough apartments.
Troub and her boyfriend currently rent a one-bedroom apartment, which she said is a steal at $1,600. But on a recent hunt to see whether she could find a bigger space, the best deal was a sublet for $2,000 — and an increase of that size would eat up her boyfriend’s last raise.
When she told the guy subletting the place that the price was too much for her, he said he wasn’t worried — he had 12 other showings lined up behind her. “It’s a rat race out there,” he told her.
The renter’s market fine print
And there are a couple of other caveats for renters to consider. First, move-in incentives don’t last forever. “As soon as they get you locked in, you’re still getting rent increases every year,” said Michelle Becker, a broker with Adaro Realty in Nashville.
Comans, the Nashville apartment hunter, has been willing to keep moving to score new deals — this is his fourth move in five years. His newly constructed one-bedroom apartment came with access to a pool, a private market and two and a half months of free rent.
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But if he wants more free rent next year, he said, “then I would have to move to do that.”
And second, rent is still more expensive than it used to be. The average rent has shot up 36.9% since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Zillow.
Even Comans is paying more than he used to: $1,800 a month. “It is a lot of money,” he said. “It’s not cheap at all.”