A brief excerpt:
Tracking rents is important for understanding the dynamics of the housing market. For example, the sharp increase in rents helped me deduce that there was a surge in household formation in 2021 (See from September 2021: Household Formation Drives Housing Demand).
The surge in household formation has been confirmed (mostly due to work-from-home), and this led to the supposition that household formation would slow sharply in 2023 (mostly confirmed) and that asking rents might decrease in 2023 on a year-over-year basis (now negative year-over-year).
Recent data suggests household formation has slowed sharply and asking rents are declining year-over-year.
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Here is a graph of the year-over-year (YoY) change for these measures since January 2015. Most of these measures are through August 2023, except CoreLogic is through July and Apartment List is through September 2023.
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With slow household formation, more supply coming on the market and a rising vacancy rate, rents will be under pressure all year. See: Forecast: Multifamily Starts will Decline Sharply
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