South Boston’s apartment rental market has remained strong throughout the pandemic despite rising vacancies across the Metro Boston area. South Boston has reported a year-over-year decrease of -70.83% in RTAR change %, while some neighborhoods like Charlestown have reported a YOY rise of +210.94% in RTAR%.
The South Boston availability rate is currently 0.35%. The real-time availability rate is calculated by dividing the total number of all vacant apartments plus available apartments which have not been vacated yet by the total supply of apartments in a given area. This is fairly low when compared to the real-time availability rate of Boston which is 2.02%. This shows that there are considerably fewer available apartments for rent in South Boston when compared to the city of Boston and its other neighborhoods.
However, the real time availability rates of South Boston apartments are still higher than that of Seaport and Bay Village where the availability rates are down to 0%. Roxbury has reported 5.62% real time availability rate and that’s the highest among all the neighborhoods in Boston. The RTAR% change for Roxbury has increased by +13.31% which shows that things haven’t improved in this town.
We can observe a similar pattern for the vacancy rates of South Boston apartments. The overall real-time vacancy rate of apartments in Boston is 1.57%. That figure increases to 1.63% when you account for the Metro area as a whole. In South Boston, it is just 0.31%. This is after recording a considerable decline of -67.71% over the last year. This trend in the vacancy rates is extremely different from that of the city of Boston where the year-over-year RTVR% has increased by +3.97%.
In addition to this, the drop in the vacancy rates of apartments in South Boston is the fifth highest among other neighborhoods in Boston after Bay Village, Northeastern/Symphony, South End, and Mission Hill which have had a year-over-year drop in the vacancy rates by -100%, -81.55%, -77.78%, and -73.93% respectively. Combine that with the fact that South Boston boasts the second lowest vacancy rate in Boston behind South End, you can see that renting an apartment in Southie is as hard as it has ever been.
