Dallas-Fort Worth apartment asking rents slipped again in October, a fourth straight month of flat or negative growth. The year still looks a little less bruised than it did in the spring. Annual rent growth improved, and it improved to a loss.
In a November 12 report, CoStar said multifamily rents fell 0.3% in October, using its daily asking-rent series. Annual rent growth improved to negative 0.3%. Bill Kitchens wrote the subscriber story. The dek puts the split plainly: annual losses kept narrowing even as the monthly result weakened.
September had already been a down month. Asking rents fell 0.2% then, and annual growth stood at negative 0.7%, CoStar reported. In March the annual decline was 2%. Calling negative 0.3% an improvement is mathematically fair. It is also still a discount from a year ago.
A Smaller Hole, Not a Turn
The October monthly drop was a touch steeper than September's. The annual figure moved the other direction, from negative 0.7% to negative 0.3%. That is the whole trick in this set of asking-rent numbers: a softer month inside a year that is losing less ground than it was.
The longer arc is uglier. As of January 12, CoStar described Dallas-Fort Worth as being in a third year of multifamily rent losses, with two-thirds of submarkets reporting deteriorating results amid excess supply. The 2026 path since then has been a narrowing, not a reversal. From a 2% annual decline in March, to roughly that same neighborhood earlier in the year, to negative 0.7% in September, to negative 0.3% in October.
Apartments Are Leasing; Rents Have Not Caught Up
Demand has not been the missing piece. Cushman & Wakefield said net absorption topped 26,700 units year to date through the third quarter, up 27.7% from a year earlier. Vacancy closed that quarter at 9.4%, a second consecutive quarterly decline. Units under construction totaled 29,700, down 13.6% from the prior quarter and 28.6% from a year earlier.
Earlier cuts of the same story point the same way. In the year ending with the second quarter, CoStar counted 28,600 units of net absorption, up 10% annually, while completed units fell 26%. Overall vacancy was down roughly 40 basis points year over year. Northmarq said second-quarter absorption of about 12,000 units nearly doubled the units delivered.
Effective rents tell a related, not identical, story. Cushman & Wakefield put the third-quarter average at $1,461 a unit, 2.0% below a year earlier. That annual decline had been 4.3% in the first quarter, and the firm tied the narrowing to recently completed communities leasing up. Those are quarterly effective rents. CoStar's October figures are daily asking rents. They should not be stacked as one tape.
Class A Already Left the Basement
By the second quarter, the market was already splitting by product. Northmarq said Class A rents rose 1.3% from the prior quarter and had recorded year-over-year growth for three consecutive quarters. Class B rose 0.8%. Class C fell 0.6%. The recovery, such as it was at midyear, started at the top of the rent roll.
Another firm's annual measure landed in the same neighborhood of improvement without matching CoStar's asking-rent math. Newmark said Dallas-Fort Worth annual rent change improved to negative 1.3% in the third quarter from negative 2.6% the quarter before. Same direction. Different yardstick.
The Country Is Already Growing
Nationally, the October dip was smaller and the year was already positive. Apartments.com said the national average apartment rent fell 0.15%, to $1,749 from $1,752 in September. Annual rent growth rose to 1.6%, from 1.5% in September and 0.9% a year earlier.
That 0.15% monthly decline was milder than the 0.25% drop in October 2025 and similar to the 0.13% drop in October 2024, Apartments.com reported. Among the top 50 markets, 42 posted monthly declines, seven were unchanged and one increased. Only 11 still had annual rent declines. Austin fell 0.6% for the month, the same monthly drop as Denver and Seattle, and was among the markets that moved into positive annual growth. Dallas-Fort Worth's monthly slip was smaller. Its year was not there yet.
The forecasts are already writing the next chapter. Northmarq expects deliveries to reach their lowest level since 2022 and rents to return to year-over-year growth by year-end, building on two recent quarterly improvements. RealPage, in the Newmark update, projected 2.4% rent growth over the 12 months after the third quarter. October's asking rents did not make that turn. With year-end only weeks out, the pipeline is shrinking and the lease-up is real. The rent tape is still the part that has not signed.
