As anyone familiar with the Boston rental market knows, a Sept. 1 lease usually is secured months in advance, given how the region’s housing cycle revolves around the academic calendar.
But in student heavy neighborhoods, including Allston and Mission Hill, lease signings have been sluggish, data show.
Some Boston realtors who work in neighborhoods near large universities, like Boston University and Northeastern, attribute the slowdown to new student visa processing protocols under the Trump administration, which has imposed additional restrictions on foreign-born students seeking visas to come study in the U.S.
Tens of thousands of international students are enrolled at Boston-area colleges and universities. And many of them help fuel the local apartment rental economy. Agents who work in this space are now noticing trickle-down effects.
Realtor Terry Leung says the biggest drop in demand is among international students. And it’s not because they don’t need apartments right now. Many of them can’t sign a lease yet — let alone enter the country — because they’re still waiting to get their student visa approved.
Many landlords won’t consider an application without a valid visa. “Most apartment [owners] are like, ‘I can’t take the risk,'” Leung said.
Leung, who does a lot of work in the Allston-Brighton area near BU, averaged only about two or three virtual consultations a day with prospective renters during May and June. That’s about half of his usual client showings.
And in Mission Hill near Northeastern — where nearly two-thirds of graduate students enrolled are international — there were more than 100 apartments still available for Sept. 1 start dates as of mid August.
“That’s pretty rare,” Leung said. “Normally [this neighborhood] runs out of everything before July.”
While the rental market has been slow in student-heavy neighborhoods, the rest of Boston has had a pretty normal summer, said Demetrios Salpoglou, the CEO of Boston Pads, a real estate website that also tracks rental data from thousands of Boston-area landlords.
Citywide, the availability rate for apartments starting on Sept. 1 is about 4% higher than this time last year. Yet in Mission Hill the availability rate is 88% higher than this time last year.
“We had a good leasing summer across the entire greater Boston area,” Salpoglou said. “It’s almost like a tale of two cities within the same city.”
September leases in Allston and Brighton were very slow to fill in early summer but have since rebounded. Salpoglou credits that to the fact that 87% of landlords in that neighborhood offered an incentive like a free month of rent.
“There’s a lot of landlords that are still nervous,” he said. “This has gone on longer than they would like.”
The pressure on international students started in January, when President Trump took office. Students with existing visas felt unsettled when the State Department abruptly began revoking visas for minor offenses like traffic violations in the spring. Though the administration eventually reversed course, the pressure and uncertainty remain for new arriving international students.
Many have faced lengthy waits for visa consultations and interview appointments. And starting in late June, the Trump administration added a new screening of social media accounts to the visa approval process.
A spokesperson from the State Department declined to comment on whether this has led to a visa processing backlog.
This rental market strain illustrates just how much international students support local economies, said Sarah Spreitzer, assistant vice president and chief of staff of government relations at the American Council on Education, an education association that advocates on behalf of about 1,600 colleges and universities. Last year, foreign-born students had a $43 billion impact on the U.S. economy total, according to a report by the Association of International Educators.
“And that’s not just tuition and fees that they’re paying to our institutions — that’s housing, food that they’re buying, transportation costs,” Spreitzer said. “This is going to have a big ripple effect on local and state economies.”
A spokesperson for Northeastern referred to the visa situation as fluid, adding that the school is helping international students as much as possible. The university is providing opportunities for remote learning, deferrals, and other contingencies such as enrolling students in the school’s London or Canadian campuses.
Spreitzer says many of her group’s member schools have considered similar options.
“I think all of our institutions are planning for a very real possibility of having fewer international students here in the United States come fall of 2025,” she said.
The Association of International Educators predicted in a recent analysis up to a 40% drop in new international student enrollment this fall. And that could have ripple effects on Boston’s rental housing market for years to come.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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