Richmond’s vacancy rate dropped from 8.2% to 5.2%, with asking rents rising 1.9% to $1,509, pushing the market into the balanced category and underscoring how quickly “value” locations can absorb excess capacity.
Portland shows a different kind of pivot but remains central to Realtor.com’s story about renter leverage. The metro’s vacancy rose from 5.7% to 7.4%, moving from balanced to renter‑friendly, while asking rents fell 2.3% to $1,627.
Denver, by contrast, moved from landlord‑friendly to balanced as vacancy rose from 4.7% to 6.5%, with median rent declining 4.9% to $ 1,729.
Sacramento followed a similar trajectory, shifting from landlord‑friendly to balanced as vacancy climbed from 3.8% to 6.9% and rents fell 2.3% to $1,818. These metros illustrate how quickly classifications can change and how dependent the durability of renter‑friendly conditions is on continued supply growth.
Some markets are tightening even as they remain, on paper, relatively advantageous for tenants. Indianapolis’ vacancy fell from 9.1% to 6.6%, moving it from renter‑friendly to balanced, while median asking rents dipped only by 0.1% to $1,277.
Columbus shifted from renter‑friendly to balanced as vacancy fell from 7.3% to 5.7%, with rents up 0.3% to $1,187.
Coastal holdouts and landlord‑friendly enclaves
Despite the broader tilt toward renters, the report identifies a small group of coastal hubs that remain landlord‑friendly. This is headlined by Boston, with vacancy remaining low, inching from 3% to 3.2%. And while the median asking rent dropped 2.6% to $2,851 —it’s still high in absolute terms despite the modest decline.
New York’s vacancy edged down from 4.7% to 4.6% and asking rents rose 0.8% to $2,882, underscoring persistent supply constraints in that region.
San Jose, with a vacancy rate of 3.5%, saw rents increase 1.9% to $3,319, the highest median among the tracked metros.
Providence and Riverside round out the landlord‑friendly group. Providence’s vacancy increased only slightly from 3.1% to 3.7%, while median rents fell 3.1% to $1,967. In Riverside, the vacancy rate slipped from 3.7% to 3.3%, with asking rents down 2.7% to $2,067.
Los Angeles, though still landlord‑leaning with a 4.4% vacancy rate, saw a 1.9% decline in rents to $2,730, while San Diego, now classified as balanced with a 5.8% vacancy rate, recorded a 4.6% rent decline to $2,639. These markets show that even in places where landlords retain leverage, rent trajectories are no longer uniformly upward and may be sensitive to incremental supply.
Washington, D.C., features prominently in the report as a case study in transition. The region moved from landlord‑friendly to balanced as vacancy rose from 4.7% to 6.3%, while asking rents still edged up 0.4% to $2,253.
San Francisco remains balanced, with vacancy dipping from 6.4% to 6% and rents up 0.4% to $2,785, suggesting that supply‑constrained coastal markets can see nominal rent growth even as classification metrics normalize.
Methodology and implications for investors
The January report also introduces a methodological change that matters for anyone benchmarking current numbers against older series. Because of this shift, the report cautions that rental data released since February 2026 is not directly comparable with previous releases or earlier economics blog posts.
For investors, that caveat means recent vacancy and rent‑trend figures from Realtor may need to be recalibrated against internal benchmarks and alternative data sources, even as the directional story is hard to ignore.
With only six of the 50 largest metros still clearly tilted toward landlords and 44 now classified as renter‑friendly or balanced, Realtor frames a new baseline for multifamily and rental‑housing investment: a market where tenants have more options and more bargaining power than at any point in the past several years.
Source: GlobeSt.
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