The National Rent Index Is Up 17.8% Year-Over-Year, the BLS Says 3.3% – Mish Talk

Please consider the Apartment List National Rent Report for February 2022, emphasis mine.

After a slight dip to close out 2021, our national index ticked back up by 0.2 percent over the course of January. Even though month-over-month growth has moved back into positive territory, rent growth has still cooled substantially from last year’s peak. Year-over-year rent growth currently stands at a record-setting 17.8 percent, but over the past four months, rents have increased by a total of just 0.9 percent. Much of this cooldown is likely related to seasonal factors; it remains to be seen if rapid rent growth will return as moving activity picks back up in the spring and summer.

41 of the nation’s 100 largest cities saw rents fall this month, and just five cities saw prices increase by more than one percent. In contrast, from last March through September, all 100 of these cities saw rents grow virtually uninterrupted, and some cities were experiencing month-over-month growth topping five percent. Consistent with this environment of cooling rent growth, our national vacancy index is also continuing to gradually tick up, indicating that the tight market conditions that characterized 2021 are easing, albeit slowly.

Over the past 12 months, rent prices spiked by an unprecedented 17.8 percent nationally. The early stages of the pandemic led to a modest decline in rents from January 2020 through January 2021 (-1.4%), but the staggering growth of 2021 more than made up for the lost ground. In fact, the national median rent ($1,312) is now $120 greater than where we project it would have been if rent growth since the start of the pandemic had been in line with the average growth rates we saw in 2018 and 2019. Rent growth over the past year has far outpaced that of any prior year in our estimates, which go back to 2017. For comparison, year-over-year rent growth in January averaged just 2.3 percent in the three years preceding the pandemic.