For most of the past decade, Vermont has had one of the tightest rental markets in the country. In Chittenden County, which holds the largest share of the state's rental housing, the vacancy rate hovered around 2% before the pandemic and fell below 1% during it. In a market that tight, landlords have little reason to negotiate and renters have little room to argue.

But recently, this has begun to change. As of June 2026, the county's rental vacancy rate has reached 3.3%, according to Brad Minor, a real estate appraiser at the South Burlington firm Allen, Brooks and Minor, which has tracked the county's rental market since 2000. That is still below the 4% to 6% range economists associate with a balanced market, but it is a real change from where things stood two years ago, and the reason for it is not complicated: Chittenden County has been building a lot of new homes.

In 2024, more than 800 new rental units came online in Chittenden County, nearly two and a half times the typical annual increase and the largest single-year gain in Minor's records. More than 500 additional units opened in 2025. As the market absorbed the new supply, the vacancy rate settled between 3% and 4%, and the pace of rent increases slowed from 6.1% in the fall of 2024 to 3.5% over the past year. VTDigger reported on these trends earlier this month, describing landlords who now compete for tenants in a way they have not had to for years. The anecdotes in the article about 10%+ price reductions at some properties are raising hopes that upcoming metrics might get even better.

This cooling is notable because it has come even as the county absorbed a significant new source of demand. Beta Technologies—the electric aviation company based in South Burlington—has hired more than 420 people this year, bringing its workforce to roughly 1,370. The company also expects to employ about 2,000 by next summer, which would make it the largest for-profit employer in the state. Minor has described Beta's hiring as a demand driver larger than any he has seen in his time tracking the local market. But he attributes its muted effect on rents to the same record construction described above. The new supply, in other words, has been enough to absorb a real increase in demand rather than be overwhelmed by it.

Let's Build Homes has long argued that building more housing is a key component to broad market housing affordability in Vermont. The Chittenden County numbers are the strongest local evidence so far that this is true.

Why new market-rate housing helps everyone

A common objection to market-rate development is that new buildings charge high rents, so they do nothing for people who need affordable housing. It is true that most new construction in Chittenden County, as in most places, targets the upper end of the market. Some new units in Burlington rent for well over $3,000 a month. This is largely due to the high cost of construction materials, labor, and project administration—even truly affordable projects are only able to achieve lower prices due to subsidy.

But the effect of new construction does not stay at the top. When people move into new high-end units, they leave behind the homes they were renting before. Those older homes, which tend to be cheaper, go back on the market, and the renters who take them free up their own previous homes in turn. Economists call this process filtering, and it is how building at the top of the market eventually reaches people who could never afford a brand-new unit.

A 2026 study from the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization measured how this works in practice. They tracked the households that moved into a new 512-unit condominium tower in Honolulu and followed the moves that resulted. People who moved into the tower left units elsewhere in the city, which were filled by other movers who in turn vacated cheaper homes. The homes that opened up through these chains were on average 40% less expensive per square foot than the units in the tower, and they were spread across the island rather than clustered near the new building. The building's benefit reached well beyond the people who actually lived in it.

Something similar appears to be underway in Chittenden County. The same reporting describes vacancies in newer, high-end buildings putting pressure on the landlords of older, middle-market apartments, many of whom had grown used to the elevated rents of the tight pandemic years. That is the filtering process beginning to show up locally.

Austin's decade of building

Chittenden County's numbers are an early, local signal that building works, but Austin, Texas offers something closer to a full demonstration measured over a decade.

Austin grew faster than almost any other American city in the 2010s, and its housing costs rose to match. Between 2010 and 2019, rents climbed nearly 93%, which was the steepest increase among major U.S. cities. The city responded with a sustained program of zoning reform. It allowed larger apartment buildings near jobs and transit, reduced parking requirements, legalized accessory dwelling units, and simplified permitting. Between 2015 and 2024, Austin added 120,000 units and expanded its housing stock by 30% — more than three times the national rate over the same period.

A March 2026 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts documented the result. Austin's median rent ran 15% above the national median in late 2021. By January 2026 it had fallen to 4% below that median, even as the city's population kept growing. Across Austin's large apartment buildings, rents fell 7% from 2023 to 2024, the steepest one-year drop of any major U.S. metro area. The decline was sharpest in “Class C” buildings, the older, non-luxury apartments that house lower-income renters, where rents fell about 11%.

Two things stand out from Austin's experience. The first is that building at scale does bring rents down, including for renters who will never live in a new apartment. The second is that it takes time and steady commitment. Austin did not reform its zoning once and then stop; it kept building over a decade, paired affordability incentives with market-rate construction, and continued adjusting its rules as it went.

The limits of the progress so far

The progress in Chittenden County is real, and a 3.3% vacancy rate is better than 1%, but still short of what a balanced market looks like. Champlain Housing Trust, a major affordable housing provider for the region, still has a ten-month waitlist for its units and renters looking for apartments under $1,500 a month still have a hard time finding them. Filtering is beginning to work, but so far it has only really taken the edge off the record-high costs of the past few years.

For that relief to last and to broaden, the building has to continue. New homes of all shapes and sizes need to keep coming online, because the gains we are seeing now are still early and easily reversed. We know this because Chittenden County has been at this moment before, and quite recently. In 2018, a large new student housing project near Champlain College briefly loosened Burlington's rental market, bringing an influx of new units into the city and spurring the kind of "competition for tenants" that stabilizes or lowers rents. Unfortunately, construction then slowed sharply through the pandemic, and within a few years the gains were gone. The tight market of 2021 and 2022 was partly a result of that slowdown.

The need to keep building is not abstract. Beta expects its hiring to continue well past its current pace, toward roughly 2,000 employees next year, and, by the company's own estimate, as many as 4,000 in the Burlington area within five years. Minor has noted that absorbing population growth on that scale would require building a great deal of housing, quickly. Demand of that kind is exactly what a steady supply of new homes is able to absorb, and exactly what a slowdown in building would leave the region exposed to.

The improvement so far is the result of years of work by state and local officials to reform zoning and make housing projects financially viable. That work produced the record construction of 2024 and 2025, and that construction is what brought rents down, even as demand grew. The lesson is straightforward: building more housing works. The question now is whether Chittenden County keeps it up, and whether the rest of the state follows.