How Much Are Multifamily Rents Rising To Start 2025? We Investigated Apartment Companies’ Earnings For Answers
In recent consumer confidence surveys, polled Americans are foreseeing a reacceleration of inflation due to tariffs and other factors. However, few surveys tackle Americans’ sentiment on housing, which often makes up the largest portion of their budget. To get a more accurate picture of the situation for renters, we dug into reports from top publicly traded multifamily landlords.
- In Q1, Mid-America Apartment Communities ($MAA), Equity ResidentialEQR, and AvalonBayAVB — which together own ~300K apartment units — reported residential revenue growth from their long-held properties of 0.1%, 2.7%, and 3% year-over-year, respectively.
- However, expenses are outstripping revenues for many landlords, leading net operating income (NOI) to grow at rates slower than inflation — meaning firms are slashing costs instead of spiking rents.
How does that stack up against the CPI? Shelter, the largest component of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, rose 4% in March, nearly double the overall CPI increase of 2.4%. But the shelter component is often considered mildly misleading since it includes metrics like Owner-Equivalent Rent (OER), which estimates what homeowners would pay to rent their own homes — based on survey responses. That’s not particularly useful for tracking real-world rent trends. So while the headlines scream “rising rents,” apartment operator data — and renter reality — looks a lot less dramatic.