Asking Rent vs Achieved Rent: What 2.9 Million Closed Listings Show

Every rent report you read is built on asking rents. The asking rent is the sticker price, the number a landlord hopes to get the day the listing goes live. It is not the rent a listing closes at. We wanted to measure the distance between the two, so we compared 2,877,532 achieved rental events, the rent at which a rental actually closed in our tracking, against 4,963,728 asking listings.

The headline is simple. In the median metro, asking rent runs 8.7 percent above achieved rent, about $200 a month. And it is not a quirk of a few markets. Of the 993 metros with enough data to qualify, 84.1 percent show asking above achieved.

Two hundred dollars a month is $2,400 a year. If you are a landlord underwriting a purchase on asking-rent comps, or a renter wondering whether the sticker is negotiable, that difference is the whole ballgame.

What "achieved rent" means, precisely

One definition before the rankings, because it matters. Achieved rent is the rent at which the listing closed in our tracking, and it comes from two places. For 213,211 records, about 7 percent, the platform reported an explicit close event: rented, leased or sold at a monthly price, so a close was observed directly. For the remaining 93 percent the listing was removed and we take the final asking price at that point, on the basis that rentals typically lease within a few percent of the final ask. Neither source is the executed lease document, so concessions and any negotiated difference from the posted rent are not visible in either case. A unit that listed at $2,000, cut to $1,850, and closed there counts at $1,850. A unit that listed at $1,800 and closed at $1,800 counts at $1,800. The gap below is therefore the combined effect of price cuts during a listing's life and the difference between the stock that gets listed and the stock that actually closes. Throughout, gap means median asking minus median achieved.

Where the sticker is most inflated

The widest gaps concentrate in smaller metros, with clusters in the Carolinas and northwest Arkansas, plus two high-rent New Jersey markets.

In Bella Vista, Arkansas, the median asking rent of $2,600 sits $1,050 above the median closed rental listing of $1,550, a 40.4 percent premium on 551 closed rental listings. Hoboken carries the largest dollar gap on the list, $1,200 a month between a $4,200 median ask and a $3,000 median close.

Where the medians flip

The remaining 15.9 percent of qualifying metros show achieved medians at or above asking medians. Here are the ten most extreme.

Be careful with this table. A negative gap does not mean tenants are routinely bidding above sticker. Median asking and median achieved describe two different pools, everything listed versus everything that closed, and in markets like Beverly Hills, where the median closed rental listing is $6,500 against a $4,997 median ask, the likelier story is composition. The units that close skew larger or more expensive than the listed stock. Four of the ten metros here are high-priced California submarkets, which fits that pattern. Portland, Oregon is the biggest market in our smallest-gap ranking, at -14.7 percent, a $2,150 median close against a $1,875 median ask on 9,733 closed rental listings. Treat negative-gap metros as a composition caution, not evidence of bidding wars.

The 15 biggest rental markets we track

Here is how the gap looks in the largest markets by closed-listing volume.

Among the big markets, Boston shows the widest gap at 16.7 percent, $600 a month on 25,749 closed rental listings, with Jacksonville, Florida close behind at 16.2 percent. New York, just outside this table by volume at 15,914 closed rental listings, has the largest dollar gap of any major market we measured, $900 a month between a $5,800 median ask and a $4,900 median close, a 15.5 percent premium. At the other end, Austin sits at parity, -0.3 percent on 15,042 closed rental listings, and Houston, Denver, and Los Angeles all show achieved medians above asking.

What this means if you are a landlord

Anchor your numbers to achieved rents, not asking rents. A comp set built from active listings is a set of prices that have not cleared. Some will clear as listed, many will clear only after cuts, and the national median distance between the two is 8.7 percent. If your pro forma only works at the asking median, it does not work. We walk through the underwriting side of this in our guide to calculating rental property cash flow, and the short version is that the rent line should come from closed rental listings. A unit priced at the number that clears is priced at the market. A unit priced at the sticker is priced above where its market has been closing.

What this means if you are a renter

In 84.1 percent of qualifying metros, the sticker sits above the close. Nationally the median difference is about $200 a month, and in the gap-heavy metros it is far more, $600 in Abilene, $682 in Fountain, Colorado, $1,200 in Hoboken. The asking price is an opening position. The closing price is the market. Knowing which metro you are in matters, because in a parity market like Austin there is little room in the median, while in a 30-percent-gap market the ask and the market are two different numbers. Our free market tools are a good place to check the data for your area before you negotiate.

Methodology

• •Achieved corpus. 2,877,532 achieved rental events, deduplicated by address and close date across our two staging corpora. Rows quarantined by our confidence checks were excluded.
• •Geography. A metro here is a postal area, the city name that routes a property's mail, not a municipal boundary: Sherman Oaks and Studio City are Los Angeles postal cities, not separate municipalities. Our per-city market pages measure Census municipal boundaries instead, so the same name can carry different figures across this site.
• •Asking corpus. 4,963,728 asking listings, our full rentals corpus.
• •Metro inclusion. A metro needed at least 200 achieved rental events to be kept. 1,937 metros met that coverage bar, and 993 qualified for the asking-versus-achieved comparison reported here.
• •Data window. All figures come from a corpus snapshot generated August 14, 2026.
• •Medians. Every figure in this study is a median, and every gap is median asking minus median achieved. Medians of two different pools can diverge for composition reasons as well as pricing reasons, which is the right way to read the negative-gap metros.
• •Coverage. Metro coverage varies with our data density, so smaller metros appear only where our rental listing tracking is deep enough to clear the 200-event bar.
• •Limitations. Achieved rent is the closing rent as recorded in our tracking, including final asking at close. Concessions negotiated off the listing, such as a free month or waived fees, are not visible to us, so true effective rents can run below even our achieved figures.

If you want this same closed-listing data applied to a specific address instead of a metro median, Resideline analyzes any address with the data behind this study. More from the same data desk: what home sellers actually made, city by city, and how to track a rental portfolio like a stock portfolio.