I’ve only been renting for a couple years now and my rent has increased a little each year. The management has done several capital improvements so the small increases seem ok. I’m wondering however if it will continue to go up a little each year or, given they way the house market is in the toilet, whether my rent could actually go down a little instead.
I guess the only incentive they’d have to lower the rent would be to attract new tenants if a lot of the apts were not rented (and right now that doesn’t seem to be the case). Would they lower it for existing tenants too though?
I have only heard of it happening once in my life. A friend of mine was renting an apartment in Queanbeyan - a medium sized country town only a few minutes from the south side of Canberra. Lots of young unattached public servants lived there at the time. After a large cut to public service numbers there was a glut of rental accomodation and rents in Queanbeyan went down. Surprisingly they lowered my friend’s rent as well. We could only figure that this was to stop him moving a few doors away to someone else’s apartment to save a few bucks.
Sure. It happened here in San Jose. Some years ago, rents here went up sharply, due to the dot.com boom. Afterwards, some rents went back down. Now, true, very few dudes got a notice that their rent was being decreased, but the average rent went down a good amount.
It’s the fundamental rule of economics, the law of supply and demand. Lower demand usually means lower rent. There are dying towns in the midwest where they will give you a house. Unfortunately there are no jobs, horrible weather, absolutely nothing to do, and nothing but farms for 100’s of miles in every direction.
Exactly. I remember that period also. If you wanted to stay in your own place, your own landlord wasn’t going to lower your rent. But if you were willing to move, you could get a place just as good as the one you were living in, and maybe better, for much lower rent.
In general, you don’t want to see rents, or the price of most items, coming down. That would indicate a period of deflation, which is, generally, Not A Good Thing. :eek:
After the “dot com bust” in 2000, a lot of rents went down in high tech hot spots.
Usually they don’t go down automatically for existing tenants, so you have to contact the owner, and say you want the same rate and “signing bonus” they are offeing to new tenants, making it clear you want to stay but are willing to go.
I rented an apartment where the landlord increased my rent on paper with the city for four years, but never in practice. Then someone else bought the building and kept my actual rent the same for another three.
Seven years paying the same rent has to be a record in my city.
My landlord here in central Mississippi has raised the rent by $100 in the last 6 years. And I just got a notice this week that it’s going up another $25 effective next month. Of course, he’s become the MS version of a slumlord (mgr says it’s because he married a new wife a few years ago who thinks he’s made of money). In order to milk his cash cow, I’d guess that more than half the neighbors I’ve got now speak Spanish only, and crowd in more people than I’d want to share a 2BR apt with.
If I look on the bright side, that gives me a chance to polish up my long disused Spanish (which I haven’t really done). I won’t enumerate the disadvantages, but they include having people upstairs who don’t understand that you shouldn’t let water set on the bathroom floor, and that you should tell somebody when a faucet starts to leak (both problems have happened multiple times). :smack:
