Concession Use Nearly Tripled in 18 Months — The Cheapest Way Out Isn't a Discount

In December 2024, 8.5% of U.S. apartments were dangling a concession to sign a lease. By the second quarter of 2026, that number had climbed to 24.6% — nearly triple in eighteen months, according to RealPage's latest data update. Roughly one in four units on the market is now buying its own occupancy with a free month or a rent break.

That's a number that should sting if you run a portfolio, because every point of it is revenue you agreed to give back.

The data

RealPage clocked concessions at 8.5% in December 2024, around 12% by mid-2025, then a sharp step to 23% in the fourth quarter and 24.6% by the second quarter of 2026. Average concession depth reached 7.6% of lease value — the deepest discounting the industry has run in years. With record new supply still delivering into softening demand, operators are competing on price because a renter with five comparable options will take the best deal.

“A concession is permanent. A month of free rent on an $18,000 annual lease is $1,500 you never recover, and next year's renewal is anchored to the discounted number. Discounting buys occupancy today and mortgages your rent roll tomorrow.”

The problem

Here's what the concession war obscures: a large share of the vacancy operators are scrambling to backfill is vacancy they created themselves. Turnover is not free — the national average cost to turn a unit is $3,872, and that's before the rent lost during the 46 days it takes, on average, to re-lease it. And the single most-cited reason residents leave is not price. It's maintenance. In our proprietary dataset drawn from more than two million work orders, 70% of non-renewing residents cite a maintenance experience as a reason they walked.

So the sequence many operators are living right now is this: a repair gets reported and slips through the cracks, the resident stews for a few weeks, they decline to renew, the unit goes vacant, and now you're offering the next renter a free month to fill a hole you dug with a missed work order. You're paying twice — once in turn cost, once in concession — to replace a resident you could have kept for the cost of showing up.

The fix, by name

This is exactly the problem FYN's Ticket board is built to kill. Every repair is tracked from the moment it's reported to the moment it's resolved, in one glance — no work order buried in an inbox, no 'I thought the vendor handled that,' no resident quietly deciding they're done. When nothing slips, the maintenance experience stops manufacturing the move-outs you're then forced to discount your way out of.

What it looks like in practice

Stop buying back residents you could have kept

Concessions at 24.6% are a market telling you that occupancy is expensive to buy. The operators who win the next twelve months won't be the ones who discount the deepest — they'll be the ones whose residents never went looking in the first place. That starts with a maintenance operation where nothing falls through.