The next housing transition will not be defined by who builds the most units.
It will be defined by who controls the rental workflow.
For years, the rental conversation has centered on demand. More renters. Longer tenures. Fewer paths to homeownership. That story is familiar and by now well understood by most real estate professionals.
What’s changing now is something more consequential. The rental market has entered an infrastructure era.
This moment is different because rental demand has reached a scale that legacy systems were never designed to support. Multifamily construction has delivered unprecedented inventory 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 U.S. housing.
But scale changes everything.
When rentals were episodic, 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 inquiries arrive faster than sales leads. Application volume compresses timelines. Landlords expect pricing guidance, screening confidence, and speed. Renters expect a professional experience that mirrors what they see in the for-sale world.
And yet, much of the rental workflow is still handled with tools and habits built for a far smaller market.
This is the uncomfortable truth. Rental demand is scaling faster than the infrastructure agents rely on to serve it.
That gap is now the defining issue.
Multifamily growth has played a major role in triggering this transition. Apartments now account for roughly one-third of all rental housing, surpassing single-family rentals for the first time in modern tracking. That shift isn’t just about where renters live. It’s about volume. High-density rentals generate velocity. More listings. More applications. More transactions. Velocity exposes friction.
At the same time, single-family rentals remain deeply resilient. In many suburban and secondary markets, rent growth for detached homes continues to outpace multifamily benchmarks, reflecting sustained demand for space and stability. This is not a market moving in one direction. It is a market expanding on multiple fronts at once.
What’s often misunderstood is who is actually powering this expansion.
Despite the attention paid to institutional ownership, the rental market remains overwhelmingly fragmented. Independent landlords still control the majority of rental properties nationwide. These owners depend on agents not just for placement, but for pricing insight, risk mitigation, and operational guidance.
As rental volume grows, those expectations rise.
This is where the agent’s role fundamentally changes. Rentals are no longer a favor, a filler, or a short-term transaction. They are a system that needs to work at scale. Agents who treat rentals as disposable transactions will struggle to keep up. Agents who treat rentals as infrastructure, repeatable, data-driven, and professional, will own long-term relationships on both sides of the market.
The implication for the industry is clear. The future of rentals will not be decided solely by inventory, interest rates, or construction cycles. It will be decided by workflow control. Who owns the renter relationship. Who standardizes the process. Who brings the rental experience into parity with the rest of residential real estate.
This is no longer about whether rentals matter. That question has been answered.
The real question now is whether the industry is prepared to operate them at scale.
Michael Lucarelli is the CEO of RentSpree.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].
