You need to have some degree of control. I live in a suburb close to a tech hub in WA. They built a lot of housing in the past 3 years. And I mean a lot. At least a couple of hundred of apartments on the market every year, after raising 3-4 buildings at the same time, in a town of 20k people.
One would think that the price would go down based on supply and demand, right? More than half of the apartments were empty while the management companies were not budging on the price. Nobody wanted to go below 2k/month for a one bedroom and they were sitting around with empty apartments. Finally they managed to reel in some suckers by offering 2-3 months free rent but again, no rent was going below 2k so the next year, you pay up or move out.
Right now, people are moving out and the apartment buildings aren't what you'd call full but again, the rent is not going down. It actually increased. Because what happens is that they're owned by large landlord corporations which can take the hit for a year or two to keep the prices up. I know this because I used to live in one. They increased my rent (years ago) from 1.2k to 1.7k and I moved out. The apartment was on the market afterwards for about a year and they didn't try too hard to get new tenants, they just posted it periodically on Craigslist. I tried to negotiate to bring it down to 1.4k and they said no. It was way profitable for anyone to keep the price up, although they lost a year of rent from it.
