Home Boston Real Estate Insights Boston Rental Market
10 minute read
Demetrios Salpoglou
June 11, 2024
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Cambridge, MA is one of the largest and most expensive rental markets outside of Boston, MA. Rental demand and apartment turnover are very high in this neighborhood on account of its close proximity to many major universities in the Boston metro, namely Harvard and MIT which are both located in Cambridge.
In Cambridge, you also have a large proportion of high-tech companies that rapidly grow, mature, and consolidate or decline based on free market forces. The typical worker is often transient to Cambridge as high-tech jobs shift more quickly than traditional companies. Therefore Cambridge is a unique market that commands high rent but has a quicker rental turnover than other Greater Boston areas. As a landlord in Cambridge, you will want to stay on top of your rentals as market forces can shift on a dime and many jobs can quickly turn into remote-based positions.
In recent years, the apartment rental market in Cambridge, MA has experienced the highest rental demand on record, driving vacancy and availability to new all-time lows. Venture capital and family office money have been strategically deployed countless times with success in Cambridge which keeps pushing demand. Rent prices rose by double-digit margins in late 2022 and 2023 as a result. Rent prices are still on the rise so far in 2024, albeit at a lower rate than the previous year. Here are the dominant data trends affecting the Cambridge apartment rental market 2024.
Cambridge, MA Apartment Rental Supply Numbers
The current real-time availability rate (RTAR) for Cambridge apartments is 3.69%. That marks an +11.14% increase compared to early June 2023, when Cambridge’s rental supply was approaching an all-time low. Though apartment availability is slightly higher year-over-year, the cyclical peak in 2024 (4.11%) was -6.59% lower than its 2023 peak of 4.4%. RTAR typically peaked in the 5-6% range in the years prior to the pandemic, which illustrates that apartment demand is as high as ever in Cambridge.
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The current real-time availability rate (RTVR) in Cambridge, MA is 1.07%. That figure is up +35.44% year-over-year. Despite being up by a one-third margin compared to last year, vacancies are still very low by historical standards. The vacancy rate spent most of the past 2 years below the 1% mark when apartment scarcity was at its highest. It will be interesting to see if the RTVR comes close to the 2% level on September 1 in Cambridge, which it had done consistently in the years prior to COVID.
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