The rental market has entered the infrastructure era

The next housing transition will not be determined by who builds the most units.
It is determined by who controls the rental workflow.

For years, the rental conversation focused on demand. More tenants. Longer terms of office. Fewer paths to homeownership. That story is well known and now well understood by most real estate professionals.

What changes now has more consequences. The rental market has entered an infrastructure era.

This moment is different because rental demand has reached a level that legacy systems were never designed for. Multifamily construction has generated unprecedented supply in urban and high-growth markets, while single-family rentals continue to anchor suburban and secondary regions. Together, these forces have expanded the rental universe beyond a side market and into a permanent layer of American housing.

But scale changes everything.

When rentals were incidental, inefficiency was survivable. When rentals become continuous, inefficiency becomes a bottleneck.

Agents are already feeling this shift, even if they don’t describe it this way. Rental requests come in faster than sales leads. The application volume compresses the timelines. Landlords expect price guidance, screening confidence and speed. Renters expect a professional experience that reflects what they see in the for-sale world.

And yet, much of the rental workflow is still handled with tools and habits designed for a much smaller market.

This is the uncomfortable truth. Rental demand is growing faster than the infrastructure agents rely on to serve it.

That gap is now the defining problem.

The growth of multifamily housing has played an important role in initiating this transition. Apartments now account for roughly a third of all rental properties, surpassing single-family homes for the first time in modern tracking. That shift is not just about where tenants live. It’s about volume. High-density rental properties generate speed. More entries. More applications. More transactions. Speed ​​exposes friction.

At the same time, single-family rental properties remain very resilient. In many suburban and secondary markets, rental growth for detached homes continues to exceed multifamily benchmarks, reflecting continued demand for space and stability. This is not a market that moves in one direction. It is a market that is expanding on several fronts at the same time.

What is often misunderstood is who is actually driving this expansion.

Despite the attention paid to institutional ownership, the rental market remains overwhelmingly fragmented. Independent landlords still control the majority of rental properties across the country. These owners depend on agents not only for placement, but also for pricing insight, risk mitigation and operational guidance.

As rental volume grows, these expectations increase.

This is where the role of the agent fundamentally changes. Renting is no longer a favor, a filler or a short-term transaction. It is a system that must work at scale. Real estate agents who view rentals as disposable transactions will struggle to keep up. Brokers who view rentals as infrastructure, repeatable, data-driven and professional, will foster long-lasting relationships on both sides of the market.

The consequences for the sector are clear. The future of rental housing will not be determined solely by inventory, interest rates, or construction cycles. This is determined by workflow control. Who owns the tenant relationship? Who standardizes the process. Which brings the rental experience in line with the rest of residential real estate.

It is no longer a question of whether rent matters. That question has been answered.

The real question now is whether the industry is willing to exploit it on a large scale.

Michael Lucarelli is the CEO of RentSpree.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial staff and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].

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