Detroit’s apartment market has seen one of the nation’s strongest recoveries since bottoming out earlier this year in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of October, occupancy in Detroit was at a hearty 97.4%, 140 basis points above the market’s worst pandemic occupancy rate of 96% seen in April 2020. Current occupancy is also well ahead of the market’s five-year average of 96.4%. Effective asking rent growth in Detroit reached a solid 4% in October. This was a three-year high for the market and well beyond the performance seen earlier in the year. While Detroit operators didn’t resort to the rent cuts seen in some apartment markets across the nation during the COVID-19 downturn, price increases here did ease to just 1.3% in May and June, the softest growth this market has seen since the Great Recession. Helping Detroit turn things around in recent months, this market has recovered more than 60% of the jobs lost during the economic downturn, adding 300,000 positions back to its workforce since April.
