Filled a vacancy last week and noticed the applicant pool was smaller than it would have been eighteen months ago, six or seven serious applications instead of the dozens I got used to writing about back in 2023 and 2024.
Still more than enough to fill the property without any real risk of an extended vacancy. Just a smaller number, which tracks with the vacancy rate loosening I wrote about a couple weeks back. Feels like a genuinely different phase of this cycle, not loose by any stretch, but no longer the extreme scarcity that defined the first three years of this whole run.
I don't think this is the start of a dramatically different rental market. It's a market slowly, unevenly, starting to find a bit more balance after years of not having any.