The Cities Where Rents Will Fall This Year
After three years of rapid growth, rental costs are projected to level off in 2016.
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After a three-year period of rapid growth, rents are likely to flatten in 2016, according to a new report. By December, year-over-year rent increases will have slowed to 1.1 percent across the U.S., according to projections published on Friday by Zillow. That follows a three-year period during which rents grew more than 3 percent each year.
Rent growth is probably easing now because construction of new apartments—which lagged considerably during the last recession—is catching up with pent-up demand. Apartment vacancies increased in the last two quarters of 2015, the first time since 2009 that vacancies went up for consecutive three-month periods.