Four currents pulling Los Angeles rents down at once

Published July 26, 2026

The largest wave of new apartments on record, the biggest population loss in America, a purchase market that has closed, and an industry that left.

Think of a rental market like a tidepool. The tide brings everything the pool needs, and rent follows the water. For most of a decade the tide only came in, and owners learned a simple rule. Every year, the rent goes up.

Then, quietly, the rule stopped working.

We manage rental units across Los Angeles, and our team gets together every quarter to review market conditions, trends, and macroeconomic factors affecting our portfolio and our clients' assets. This quarter the review kept landing in the same place. Good units, once at the peak of demand, are taking longer to lease. Tenants are staying put instead of moving out. And asking rents in the county are drifting lower, to their lowest level in four years. Median asking rent was $2,520 in the first quarter of 2026, 10.6 percent below the summer of 2022 peak.

We wondered what changed. It turns out there are four themes, all moving in a similar direction.

The first current is new water

When interest rates fell, cheap money started a new wave of construction. Apartments take years to build, which means the boom that began during the pandemic is only now reaching its peak of delivery. More than twelve thousand new units will finish across Los Angeles this year, the largest wave of new apartments since counting started twenty six years ago. When that many new homes open at once, every renter has somewhere else they could live, and the pressure that used to sit on the tenant sits on the owner instead.

The second current flows out

Last year Los Angeles County lost more people than any county in America, nearly fifty four thousand residents, gone to the Inland Empire, Nevada, Texas, anywhere that is cheaper. Even counting everyone who arrived, the county ended the year smaller. There are more empty homes and fewer renters, meaning lower competition and less upward pressure on rents.

The third current is the price of a home

In the year two thousand, buying the median home in Los Angeles took about thirty eight thousand hours of work at minimum wage. Today it takes about fifty five thousand, forty four percent more. For many renters the door to owning has quietly and permanently closed, and that stillness shows up in our leasing data rather than in the headlines. People are afraid to move, which means good units wait longer for their next tenant.

The fourth current is work

Film and television employment in this county has fallen from about one hundred forty two thousand jobs to about one hundred thousand, and shoot days have been cut nearly in half since 2022. Entertainment is not the whole economy here, but it is the part that historically absorbed the newest and most mobile renters. When the current that feeds the pool slows, everyone in the market feels the change.

What we make of it

The market is still agitated, especially by the fires of 2025, which pushed tens of thousands of families back into the rental pool. That is real, and in some submarkets it is the whole story of the last twelve months. We do not see it, especially in the middle market, as a core driver of where rents are heading.

While the current picture is not as sunny as Los Angeles normally is, this has happened before in our city's history, and it will likely happen again. At Schofield we think it is important to take a candid and analytical view, to understand where we should be positioning our client assets given our future market expectations. As Warren Buffett put it, be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.

Sources

Realtor.com Los Angeles County rental report, first quarter 2026. RealPage apartment completions for Los Angeles, 2026. United States Census Bureau county population estimates, July 2024 to July 2025. Los Angeles Almanac and Redfin median home prices; California Department of Industrial Relations minimum wage history. FilmLA employment and shoot day reports, 2022 through 2025. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, 2004.

Topics: film, market

See what your property could rent for

Back to the Schofield Properties blog

Schofield Properties is a family run property management company at 323 Richmond St, El Segundo, CA 90245. We have managed the South Bay since 1972 and personally oversee about 186 doors today. Book a call to talk about your property.