Single-Family & Multifamily Rents in Face of an Onslaught of New Supply & Fading Population Growth

The gap between single-family rents and multifamily rents has widened massively. A look at 14 big markets.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The surge of inflation in 2021 and 2022 that would eventually reach a pace of 9% year-over-year was in part driven by spiking rents, both for single-family and multifamily rental units. These spiking rents accelerated an ongoing surge of new construction both of big multifamily rental developments, often towers with hundreds of units each, and single-family build-to-rent developments, where corporate money was invested to create large amounts of single-family rental supply, entire suburban developments of often hundreds of purpose-built single-family rental homes each.

Those rent increases fired up the construction machinery: From January 2020 through June 2026, multifamily mid-tier asking rents across the US surged by 33%, led by the metropolitan areas of Denver, CO (+69%); Seattle, WA (67%); Salt Lake City, UT (+67%); Los Angeles, CA (+65%); Portland, OR (+57%); and Dallas, TX (+56%).

Mid-tier single-family asking rents exploded by 52% over the same period, led by the metropolitan areas of Knoxville, TN (+74%); Providence, RI (+71%); Miami, FL (+70%); Charleston, SC (+70%); Tampa, FL (+65%); Cleveland, OH (+64%); Cincinnati, OH (+61%); Virginia Beach, VA (+61%), as per data from the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI).

Most of the huge increases in mid-tier asking rents occurred in 2021 through 2022. In 2023 through 2025, rent growth flattened out in most markets, and in some markets, asking rents declined.

But there are some exceptions, such as San Francisco, where asking rents, after flat-lining, started surging again in late 2024 and are now spiking.

The gap between single-family rents and multifamily rents has continued to widen, reaching 29.7% in June at the national level, more than double the difference before the pandemic (between 12% and 14%).

The year-over-year increases of mid-tier rents at the national level ticked up again in recent months from a low pace, and in June accelerated to 1.4% for multifamily, and to 2.8% for single-family.

These rent increases are low compared to the years before the pandemic, when rents increased by roughly 4% year-over-year. But they come on top of very high rents to begin with.

The onslaught of supply of housing units in multifamily buildings, as measured by construction starts, had already been running at multi-decade highs before the pandemic, and then surged in 2021 through 2023 to the highest level since the last boom in the mid-1980s. Even the slower pace in 2025 was the highest since the 1980s boom, except for 2021-2023 (see our analysis here).

As these units were completed, they added supply to the rental market. Even condos added supply to the rental market as condos have been a popular way for retail investors to get into multifamily rentals and face losing their shirts as condo prices plunged in many markets.

This new construction created higher-end supply, higher-end because that’s the only place where new construction pencils out (except when subsidized). And the onslaught of higher-end rental units and condos-for-rent put pressure on everything below.

But population growth suddenly slowed to a crawl (analysis and details here) amid the crackdown on illegal immigration and tightening up of legal immigration, when this flood of new multifamily construction came on the market.

In terms of single-family rentals (SFRs), build-to-rent has become the mantra. All big single-family landlords got into it, some collaborating with big homebuilders, others forming their own homebuilding divisions. And that surge of supply of new higher-end single-family rental properties, targeting higher-income “renters of choice” (who have the money to buy but choose to rent), has put single-family rents under pressure.

Who owns the housing rental stock? There are about 50 million rental units of all types in the US. About 15 million of them, or about 30%, are SFRs. About 82% of those 15 million SFRs are owned by mom-and-pop landlords with 1-10 rentals. The remaining 18% are owned by larger landlords, including a handful of giant landlords (see our analysis and charts of who owns the US rental housing stock).

While the SFR market is dominated by mom-and-pop, the multifamily market is dominated by big institutional landlords.

Since 2022, numerous big multifamily landlords have defaulted on their debts, and lenders seized properties or sold the debts to investors that then seized the properties, etc., and we discussed some of those processes here from time to time. The delinquency rate for multifamily Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) surged to over 7% (data from Trepp):

But it varies dramatically from market to market.

Below is a sample of 14 big metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), showing asking rents for single-family and multifamily properties, per the seasonally adjusted ZORI.

New York City metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $3,351
- Month-to-month: +0.4%
- Year-over-year: +4.4%
- Since Jan 2020: +39%
Single-family ZORI: $3,631
- Month-to-month: +0.4%
- Year-over-year: +4.3%
- Since Jan 2020: +52%

Single-family and multifamily rents are increasing in near-lockstep at a brisk rate.

Los Angeles metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $2,692
- Month-to-month: +0.1%
- Year-over-year: +0.7%
- Since Jan 2020: +26%
Single-family ZORI: $4,506
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +2.3%
- Since Jan 2020: +46%

Chicago metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $2,203
- Month-to-month: +0.4%
- Year-over-year: +5.1%
- Since Jan 2020: +40%
Single-family ZORI: $2,577
- Month-to-month: +0.5%
- Year-over-year: +4.8%
- Since Jan 2020: +54%

Dallas-Fort Worth metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,513
- Month-to-month: -0%
- Year-over-year: -1.0%
- Since Jan 2020: +20%
Single-family ZORI: $2,313
- Month-to-month: 0.4%
- Year-over-year: +1.2%
- Since Jan 2020: +42%

Multifamily rents have dropped by 5% from the peak in mid-2022. But single-family rents have continued to rise from record to record.

Washington D.C. metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $2,298
- Month-to-month: 0%
- Year-over-year: -1.4%
- Since Jan 2020: +17%
Single-family ZORI: $3,354
- Month-to-month: +0.2%
- Year-over-year: +3.0%
- Since Jan 2020: +41%

Same type of divergence is developing as in Dallas, with multifamily rents falling and single-family rents rising.

Philadelphia metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,848
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +2.9%
- Since Jan 2020: +31%
Single-family ZORI: $3,144
- Month-to-month: +0.4%
- Year-over-year: +4.2%
- Since Jan 2020: +50%

Miami metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $2,501
- Month-to-month: +0.1%
- Year-over-year: +0.5%
- Since Jan 2020: +51%
Single-family ZORI: $3,461
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +1.9%
- Since Jan 2020: +70%

Atlanta metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,663
- Month-to-month: 0.2%
- Year-over-year: +0.8%
- Since Jan 2020: +24%
Single-family ZORI: $2,297
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +2.4%
- Since Jan 2020: +59%

Boston metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $3,168
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +2.2%
- Since Jan 2020: +33%
Single-family ZORI: $3,966
- Month-to-month: +0.2%
- Year-over-year: +4.0%
- Since Jan 2020: +47%

Phoenix metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,526
- Month-to-month: +0.1%
- Year-over-year: -1.2%
- Since Jan 2020: +33%
Single-family ZORI: $2,321
- Month-to-month: +0.3%
- Year-over-year: +1.2%
- Since Jan 2020: +57%

This divergence of rising single-family rents and falling multifamily rents (-8% since spring 2022) is now a common occurrence.

San Francisco metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $3,058
- Month-to-month: +1.3%
- Year-over-year: +8.4%
- Since Jan 2020: +14%
Single-family ZORI: $4,196
- Month-to-month: +0.5%
- Year-over-year: +4.7%
- Since Jan 2020: +28%

The AI boom has infected everything, including the rental market. Multifamily rents, after years of quasi-stability, started surging in late 2024 and have since then surged by 13%. June showed the biggest month-to-month spike yet (+1.3%).

Seattle metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $2,090
- Month-to-month: +0.1%
- Year-over-year: +0.6%
- Since Jan 2020: +23%
Single-family ZORI: $3,510
- Month-to-month: +0.2%
- Year-over-year: +2.9%
- Since Jan 2020: +45%

Denver metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,725
- Month-to-month: 0%
- Year-over-year: -2.5%
- Since Jan 2020: +15%
Single-family ZORI: $3,018
- Month-to-month: +0.2%
- Year-over-year: +0.9%
- Since Jan 2020: +37%

Again this divergence, with multifamily rents falling and single-family rents rising from record to record.

Austin metro:

Multifamily ZORI: $1,463
- Month-to-month: +0.1%
- Year-over-year: -2.9%
- Since Jan 2020: +9%
Single-family ZORI: $2,319
- Month-to-month: +0.2%
- Year-over-year: +0.6%
- Since Jan 2020: +32%

Multifamily rents have dropped by 16% from the peak in mid-2022, amid an onslaught of supply. Single-family rents eased only gradually, and over the past few months started ticking up again.