A glut of apartment inventory across the Sun Belt helped push the national apartment vacancy rate to 7.3 percent this spring, forcing a growing number of property managers to offer concessions to lure in new tenants.
Incentives such as free rent, waived application and other fees, and reduced move-in costs showed up on about 40 percent of apartment listings during the spring period, a rental report released May 27 by Zillow found. A year prior, about one-third of apartment listings offered concessions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for apartments was extremely robust, only 16 percent of property managers used concessions to bring in new tenants.
