Inland Empire apartment rents turn back up as the supply wave eases

Citrus Belt Review: Inland Empire apartment rents climbed 1.0% quarter-over-quarter to an average $2,320 per unit in the first quarter, per CBRE's Q1 multifamily figures — a turn upward after two straight quarterly declines. The gains concentrated in older assets, where demand stayed focused on affordability and faced less competition from newly delivered high-end communities.

The recovery comes off the bottom of a supply glut. More than 3,700 units delivered over the past year pushed occupancy down for a third straight quarter, to 95.4%, even as net absorption swung to positive 132 units from negative 202 in Q4 2025. CBRE tied the demand back to population growth and in-migration from coastal markets. Investment sales told a similar story of selective strength: volume fell to $108.7 million from $127.2 million, but per-unit pricing rose to $262,000, lifted by an institutional buyer's purchase of The Hawthorne, a newly built 178-unit community in Riverside.

The turn tracks a national rent story that is fundamentally about supply. U.S. rent growth has flatlined — Apartments.com put annual growth at roughly 0.4% to 0.6% early in 2026 — and the metros that overbuilt are paying for it, with Austin and San Antonio rents down about 3.3% on oversupply. The IE spent two years on that wrong side of the cycle. What's changing is the pipeline: Northmarq forecasts roughly 2,500 IE deliveries in 2026, well below the 2023-2025 pace, and projects a 1.3% full-year rent gain — modest, but a shift after two years of softening.

That makes the IE neither a San Francisco-style breakout nor a Sun Belt casualty, but a market climbing off the floor of the same supply cycle. The question for the rest of the year is whether slowing construction lets absorption catch up before the next wave of Class A deliveries tests pricing again.