You would think so--but I don't think the rental market is that elastic anymore. I'm in a college town, so take this with a grain of salt, your milage may vary,

You would think so--but I don't think the rental market is that elastic anymore. I'm in a college town, so take this with a grain of salt, your milage may vary, etc, but around here with the looming possibility of all the schools being online only in the fall, loads of houses are sitting unrented. In a naive model you would expect to see these houses rent fall in a bid to capture any sort of rent. However what we're seeing in many places here is the opposite--the rent is RISING. The owners behind these properties have non-elastic costs. They've purchased these properties as investments using borrowed money. The bank doesn't stop collecting their payments just because the house is empty. So they have a stable of properties and falling numbers of renters so they RAISE the rent to try and extract any value from the few renters they can capture to try and cover their debts. It was happening with commercial properties before the COVID pandemic. I started noticing this because I was looking for warehouse space for personal woodworking projects and office space for my business (neither with any sort of urgency, so lots of browsing over time). I noticed that the stock increased every month, but the prices never budged. Then in the local business newspaper they started listing square footage of unrented business properties. Month after month it has increased with no visible signs of rent adjustment. I suspect the only thing that will eventually cause rents to decrease property speculators defaulting on their loans, which will lead to bank foreclosures and sales. The banks will then hold on to the properties and keep listing them because they can afford to hold the properties and attempt to wait to receive a 'market rate' sale price. Once the banks can no longer afford to just sit on the properties and sell them for whatever they can get for them, then you'll start to see a cycle of falling rents. Until then I think you're going to see stagnant or even increasing rents.