Recent top story, US asking rents ended 2024 at the lowest level in nearly three years.

Now, I’m forever flooded in the comments with people saying, you know what, every time we talk about rent, it is not down. It does not feel less. It still feels overpriced.

So yes, it is down, and it has been showing a consistent drop, but it is such a negligible movement that you almost can’t see it in the crowd. It’s like, yay, it stopped growing, but it’s not necessarily dropping in a tangible way. Look at what it said here in the lead headline.

The median asking rent fell 0.3% year over year in December to $1,594, the lowest level since March, 2022. Now look at this. Austin, Texas posted the biggest decline with asking rents down 16%.

Look who it’s followed by. Tampa and then Jacksonville. Now, if you scroll down, they start to give us a headline for what’s coming this year.

It said, we’re kicking off 2025 in a renter’s market with many renters finding apartments cost less than a year ago, especially in the Sunbelt. Now, why is the Sunbelt seeing such a pullback? Well, understand that during the COVID era, there was a massive inbound migration to the Southern states. When people could kind of decide where they wanted to work, a lot of people moved across Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas.

All these states became flooded with people moving here. At the same time, around two to three years ago, there was a massive spike in multifamily and apartment building, new permit pulling. And now we’re seeing the product of that because the peak of the release of those happened in the end of 2024.

So now all these buildings go up, all these property managers get tasked with these big empty buildings. They say, hey, you gotta fill these really, really fast. So they start offering free rent, incentives and all that kind of stuff.

You can see Orlando, Florida, if we scroll down is $1,715 a month for the median. Its median is down 2% year over year. Now look at again, Jacksonville, negative 6%.

You gotta understand anything 2% and up is gonna put your marketplace in the top 10 in terms of its falling apartment rent. So Orlando is probably in the top 10, 12, 13 of all markets in the country in terms of its rents are coming down. Now, do not get too excited renters if you’re looking for a single family home because in my personal purview, I’ve looked very closely recently, I would imagine you’re not seeing much of a softening because a lot of the rental announcement of what we’re watching, what we’re measuring is a lot of this happening in the apartment sector.

Now, the question becomes if all these people that come to Florida and Orlando specifically wanna migrate into apartments, are they not going to rent a house they had planned because the apartments rent is so much more appealing. Does that starve the demand a little bit for the housing structures? Could, and honestly, we gotta see what happens because really we’re gonna be releasing a lot more apartments in the Orlando Metro over the next 18 months and then it’s gonna subside dramatically. But what’s really happening is a lot of buildings are being completed, they’re being released to the market and those have to be filled.

Then ultimately what happens, there’s a lot of pressure on the apartment managers to get people in the doors. Once that thing’s producing volume, they’re gonna let the rents probably stabilize over time. But right now it’s kind of a free for all in terms of offering a lot of goodies and things of that nature to get these places rented out and underway as new buildings.