Thursday, June 28, 2018

Increased Supply Is Holding Down Rent Increases

See Looking for an Apartment? It Is a Great Time to Rent: Rents are flattening in major U.S. cities, landlords offer a free month, Amazon gift certificates among other perks by Laura Kusisto of The WSJ.

Rent increases have slowed down. In competitive markets, if prices rise and profits therefore go up for firms, in the long run, more firms will enter and supply will increase, bringing prices back down. This might be happening now with apartment. It might not have happened quickly because it does take time to build new apartment complexes.

Excerpts from the article:
"Driving this dynamic is a flood of new apartments and weakening demand."

"Rents rose 2.3% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, the smallest annual increase since the third quarter of 2010 . . . due to large amounts of new supply."

"While average rents continued to grow, individual landlords cut rents in some markets. In addition, landlords are offering tenants incentives including as many as three months paying no rent, free parking, credit for ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft, and Amazon gift cards for as much as $2,500"

"Developers responded to escalating rents by building the most new apartments in 30 years, sending a flood of new high-end units to downtown areas across the country. Developers are expected to add 300,000 new units over the next year"

"The national vacancy rate ticked up to 4.8% from 4.3% in the second quarter of 2017."

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