Renters looking for a downtown apartment this summer can expect fewer options — and very few deals.
The net monthly rent at top-tier apartment buildings in downtown Chicago jumped 6.25% year over year in the first quarter of 2025, according to new data from the Chicago office of appraisal and consulting firm Integra Realty Resources. High rents are expected to persist over the next few months as the market sees the number of new apartments delivered annually hit a nearly three-decade low.
“The rents are just going to continue to escalate,” Integra Senior Managing Director Ron DeVries said. “From a tenant perspective, the options are going to be pretty thin and pricey in the market for the next couple of years.”
That’s the smallest number of new apartments to be added to the downtown market in almost 30 years, according to Integra. DeVries attributed the supply drop-off to the challenge of attracting institutional capital to Chicago as well as rising construction costs. Few major ground-up projects downtown have gotten underway over the last couple of years, with a Vista Property Group project in Fulton Market breaking a nearly 18-month drought by securing $173 million in financing last month.
“It’s the capital stack, it’s the construction costs, it’s a little bit of everything,” DeVries said.
Apartment deliveries are expected to tick back up slowly, with Integra forecasting about 440 units to be delivered downtown in 2026 and 1,850 in 2027.
Absorption, a measure of demand that tracks the change in the number of occupied apartments, was 1,113 units in the first quarter. As a result, Integra is projecting downtown to have the smallest number of vacant units this summer since the third quarter of 2015. The firm projects that there will be 2,500 vacant units in the second quarter of this year, out of the almost 60,000 units in the market included in Integra’s survey. Vacancy is expected to remain low through 2026.
Integra predicts few concessions — deals to attract residents like a month of free rent — as recently delivered buildings in the lease-up phase stabilize.
So while it’s not impossible to find an apartment downtown, prospective tenants will have slimmer pickings at higher prices.
“Before, you could look online, and if you’re looking for a one-bedroom apartment in a certain size range or floor plan, you might have six options for buildings you could look at to meet that need, but now you might have half those options because the buildings just won’t have that unit type available,” DeVries said.
