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With less than two weeks to move-in, the availability rate of Mission Hill, Fenway, and even Cambridge is significantly higher than last year.
Boston’s rental market revolves around students, and with the status of international students in flux, some neighborhoods are seeing far more unsigned leases as Sept. 1 approaches than in recent years.
As some universities’ international students amount to a quarter of their student bodies, some neighborhoods are being hit hard, according to data compiled by Boston Pads.
Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard University are among the colleges who enroll thousands of international students, who contribute nearly $4 billion to the Massachusetts economy. The Trump administration’s heightened vetting of visas and travel bans are expected to keep some of those students off campus this year.
BU and Northeastern did not return a request for comment about international student enrollment, and Harvard said its enrollment data will be available later in the fall.
With fewer than two weeks till move-in, the availability rate of Mission Hill, Fenway, and Cambridge is significantly higher than last year, according to data compiled by Boston Pads, while the rest of Boston is keeping pace.
“I’ve been doing real estate and technology for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, told Boston.com. “It’s very acute. It’s not impacting all neighborhoods … it’s really proximity to a lot of universities that have a heavy reliance on foreign money or foreign enrollment.”
Mission Hill, Fenway see high availability rate compared to Boston overall and last year
Mission Hill particularly is seeing a more than 90 percent increase in availability rate compared to this time last year, according to data from Boston Pads. Fenway’s availability rate is also higher than Boston’s as a whole, and nearly 10 percent higher than the neighborhood’s availability rate last year. Fort Hill, a smaller neighborhood near Roxbury, also has a nearly 80 percent higher availability rate compared to 2024.
While Allston and Brighton are close to BU, which boasts a significant international student population, the availability rates in those neighborhoods are closer to average for this time of year.
Apartments took longer to rent in the Kenmore area but it eventually filled out, said Gabriella, a business manager with Kenmore Properties, who declined to use her last name for professional reasons. Mission Hill, however, has a lot of units still available.
Salpoglou said those rents are down, and plenty of leases have been signed.
“Every landlord has their own decision to make. Every landlord makes their own gut instincts. Everyone decides when they’ll drop their rent,” Salpoglou said. “The landlords in Allston did a better job of reading this, understanding what was happening with the international students, and they decided to just take action a little bit earlier.”
Cambridge’s availability rate is less than a percentage point higher than Boston’s, but that rate is up 20 percent from last year. Gabriella also noted that she’s working with a fair amount of still-available units near Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
International clients are way down, realtor says
Gabriella, a business manager at Kenmore Properties, said international students and workers usually make up 50 percent of their client base. This year, it’s closer to 20 percent, she said.
Kenmore Properties is currently working with people abroad who are ready to sign apartment leases.
“But, they can’t even apply because the administration is keeping their visa statuses in a purgatory until the very last moment,” she told Boston.com. “It has affected our business, because it has stalled a lot of leases that everyone’s ready to go, but just waiting on that paperwork.”
But, Gabriella is expecting some students to trickle in.
“Thankfully, we have seen in the past couple of weeks an increase in international student renters,” she said. “I have a feeling that September this year, we’re still going to see a good amount of activity in terms of people looking for rentals, and apartments still being available.”
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