With 97.5% of apartments managed by professionals in the U.S., occupancy reached an all-time high in December, Bloomberg notes in a recent article. That's an astonishing occupancy rate, according to specialists. It's 2 percentage points higher than December 2020-meaning hundreds of thousands of apartments-in an industry where rates between 95% and 96% are considered full occupancy, they say.

The U.S. apartment rental market looked like it would undergo major changes during the pandemic, with many families looking for a new home in the suburbs, driving apartment vacancy. However, the numbers indicate that this was not the case. The number of families moving between March 2020 and March 2021 was minimal, according to a Pew Research Center report cited in the article.The result? Rents continue to rise in a market where demand continues to outstrip supply.