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SUMMARY
Rents are still rising in Argentina because inflation has not disappeared; deregulation mainly changed rental supply and contract mechanics, not the general price level. In Buenos Aires, the more important result is that asking rents are currently falling in real terms even while their peso price keeps going up.
The supply response was enormous. Traditional Buenos Aires rental listings jumped immediately after deregulation, expanded 195.4% during 2024 and now stand at roughly 3.4 times their 2023 trough, while academic research also finds a large reform-driven increase.
Deregulation changed the timing of inflation inside rental contracts. Landlords can now adjust rents every few months instead of protecting themselves against a full year of inflation through an unusually high starting price.
That helps explain the apparent contradiction tenants see today. Entry prices can become more competitive while the rent itself seems to increase constantly because adjustments happen much more often.
Buenos Aires rents are currently rising more slowly than consumer prices. The gap is modest in CABA but much larger in GBA North, West and South, where real asking rents are down roughly 6% to 8% this year.
The post-reform market has not moved in a straight line. There was a huge initial supply release and real rent drop, then a partial rebound as the one-off supply shock faded, and now another period of softer real rents around Buenos Aires.
Argentina does not have one rental market. Córdoba and Rosario have recently shown real rent increases, so national statements about rents after deregulation can hide very different local conditions.
The freshest indexes also have an important limit: they mostly measure advertised rents. They tell us what a new tenant encounters when searching today, but not the full cost of every signed contract once adjustment clauses, deposits, expensas and utilities are included.
Landlord economics have clearly improved. Gross rental yields are now around 5.8% in CABA, about 6% in GBA North and close to 7.8% in Córdoba, giving owners a much stronger reason to keep properties in the long-term rental market.
The reform fixed a serious circulation problem in the existing housing stock, but that was the easy part. Making Buenos Aires genuinely affordable now depends much more on household incomes, construction, housing supply and broader access to mortgages.
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Why are rents still rising in Argentina after deregulation?
What did Argentina actually change when it deregulated rents?
Argentina’s rental deregulation gave landlords and tenants far more freedom over prices, contract length, currencies and rent increases, so the reform changed how rents are negotiated rather than stopping them from rising.
The previous system had become unusually rigid for a country with triple-digit inflation. Under the 2020 Rental Law, residential contracts generally lasted three years and rent could initially be adjusted only once a year using the ICL index, which combined inflation and wages. A reform passed in 2023 changed the formula and allowed six-month adjustments, but it survived for only a short period.
DNU 70/2023 then removed most of those national restrictions. Argentina’s Civil and Commercial Code currently lets the parties decide the contract length. If they do not specify one, the default for permanent housing is two years. Rent can be agreed in pesos or foreign currency, and the parties can choose the index used for future increases. Deposits are also negotiated much more freely.
The adjustment rule is especially important in Argentina. When inflation was running above 100%, a landlord forced to wait twelve months for the next increase had a strong reason to build expected inflation into the starting rent. A landlord who can adjust every three or four months needs less protection upfront.
So deregulation changed both supply incentives and the timing of price increases. That is the starting point for understanding why rents can still rise today even when the reform has pushed prices below the path they were previously following.
Did Buenos Aires really get many more rental apartments after deregulation?
Yes. The increase in Buenos Aires rental supply was huge, immediate and far too large to explain away as normal market noise.
Zonaprop’s historical series shows traditional rental supply in CABA reaching its lowest point in early 2023 after several years of decline. Immediately after the old Rental Law disappeared, listings jumped 62% in one month. Supply then rose 195.4% over 2024.
The level has moved around since that extraordinary first wave, but it remains vastly above the pre-reform trough. Zonaprop’s latest CABA index puts available rental supply at roughly 3.4 times the minimum reached in 2023.
Academic work backs up the raw listing data. Martin Elfert and Stephan Thomsen studied weekly Buenos Aires listings around the deregulation for an IZA discussion paper. Their preferred specification estimated an immediate supply increase of about 46%, or roughly 2,670 additional listings, followed by further growth in the first part of the post-reform period.
The exact size varies depending on the statistical specification, so 46% should not be treated as a perfectly measured national effect. The direction is much harder to dispute. Apartments returned to the traditional rental market very quickly once landlords could negotiate contracts more freely.
Some of those units probably came from short-term rentals or previously vacant properties. Zonaprop data cited by the IZA researchers show temporary rental supply had risen about 52% during 2023, while earlier housing studies had also documented rising vacancy in Buenos Aires. Deregulation gave owners a reason to put some of that existing stock back into long-term rental.
| Buenos Aires rental-supply measure | Before/around deregulation | What happened afterward | What we learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional rental listings | Historical low in 2023 | About 3.4× the trough currently | The old shortage of listings has largely disappeared |
| First major monthly move | Very depressed supply | +62% in one month | Owners reacted almost immediately |
| Supply during 2024 | — | +195.4% | The first response was exceptional in scale |
| IZA preferred estimate | Pre-reform trend | About +46% at deregulation | Research also finds a causal supply effect |
| Temporary rentals before reform | +52% during 2023 | Some units later returned to traditional rental | Part of the increase came from reallocating existing homes |
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If supply exploded, why are Buenos Aires rents still going up?
Buenos Aires rents are still going up in pesos because Argentina still has inflation. The extra supply has mainly slowed those increases rather than producing sustained nominal rent cuts.
Take a simple example. Suppose an apartment costs ARS 500,000 and would have risen 50% without any improvement in supply. The new rent would reach ARS 750,000. If more competition keeps the increase to 30%, the tenant still sees the rent rise to ARS 650,000 even though the apartment has become substantially cheaper relative to the counterfactual.
The current CABA market looks a lot like that.
Zonaprop’s latest index shows the average advertised rent rising 30.7% over twelve months. That sounds extremely high until we compare it with consumer inflation, which reached 33.7% over the same broad period. Nominal rents kept climbing while losing ground against the overall price level.
The gap is also visible this year. Advertised CABA rents have risen 17.5%, compared with inflation of 19.2%. In real terms, that works out to a modest decline.
This is where much of the public argument gets confused. A supply reform does not need to make peso prices fall to be working in an inflationary economy. The useful test is whether rents rose more slowly than they otherwise would have, and the latest Buenos Aires data strongly suggest that they did.
Are Buenos Aires rents actually getting more expensive right now?
In real terms, average asking rents in Buenos Aires are currently edging down rather than getting more expensive.
Zonaprop calculates that CABA rents have fallen about 1.7% against inflation so far this year. The twelve-month picture points in the same direction: advertised rents rose 30.7%, while the general price level rose 33.7%.
The surrounding Buenos Aires metro area is even softer.
In GBA North, the average two-room apartment now rents for roughly ARS 812,000. Rents there have increased 12.9% this year, which leaves them about 6.3% lower after inflation. Over twelve months, the real decline reaches 7.7%.
GBA West shows a similar pattern. Its average two-room rent is around ARS 637,000, with prices up 11.4% this year and down roughly 7.8% in real terms. GBA South is almost identical: rents are up 11.7% and down about 7.5% after inflation.
That gives us a broader observation than CABA alone. Across the main Buenos Aires metropolitan rental markets covered by Zonaprop, nominal rents are still rising, but the current real direction is clearly downward.
| Market | Typical apartment | Rent increase this year | Real change vs. inflation | Current direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CABA | 2 rooms: ~ARS 874k | +17.5% | -1.7% | Mild real decline |
| GBA North | 2 rooms: ~ARS 812k | +12.9% | -6.3% | Clear real decline |
| GBA West | 2 rooms: ~ARS 637k | +11.4% | -7.8% | Clear real decline |
| GBA South | 2 rooms: ~ARS 628k | +11.7% | -7.5% | Clear real decline |
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Did deregulation actually push Buenos Aires rents down?
Yes. The best research we have so far finds that Buenos Aires rents fell relative to their previous trajectory immediately after deregulation, especially once inflation is taken into account.
The IZA study by Elfert and Thomsen is useful here because it does more than compare prices before and after the reform. The researchers examine the break around deregulation using weekly listing data.
Depending on the specification, they estimate nominal price effects of roughly a few percentage points downward and much larger real declines, with some estimates between about 13% and 29%. The price results are less statistically stable than their supply findings, so the exact percentage deserves caution. Still, the estimates overwhelmingly point toward lower real rents after liberalization.
The raw market trajectory fits that result. Before deregulation, annual asking-rent increases in Buenos Aires had reached several hundred percent as inflation accelerated and landlords priced in the risk of being stuck with the same rent for long periods. Once adjustment clauses became flexible and thousands of listings returned, rent inflation collapsed.
That first phase was powerful. Owners gained more flexibility, tenants gained far more choice, and real asking prices dropped sharply from an exceptional peak.
Why did rents start catching up again after the first drop?
The first supply shock could not repeat forever because most of the apartments that could quickly return to the market had already done so.
The 2024 numbers were extraordinary: traditional CABA rental supply rose 195.4%. That was possible because owners could reactivate apartments almost instantly. Building 10,000 new homes would take years; relisting 10,000 existing homes can happen in weeks.
The pace eventually cooled. CABA supply fell 6.9% during 2025 and has moved much more modestly during 2026. The stock of listings is still high, but the market is no longer receiving anything close to the initial surge.
Rents responded accordingly. CEPA found that during a long stretch after the initial adjustment, asking rents began increasing faster than general inflation again. Some of the huge real decline produced after deregulation was clawed back.
Lately, the balance has shifted once more. CABA rents are again running slightly below inflation, while all three major GBA zones covered by Zonaprop show larger real declines.
In practice, the market has moved in three phases: a huge supply release and real rent drop, a partial rebound as that adjustment faded, and a softer market again today.
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Is the same thing happening across Argentina?
No. Argentina currently has several different rental markets moving in different directions, which makes national claims about “rents after deregulation” unusually misleading.
Buenos Aires and its surrounding metro area are currently showing real rent declines. Córdoba and Rosario provide the obvious counterexamples.
Zonaprop’s latest Córdoba index puts the average one-bedroom rent at around ARS 619,000. During the first quarter, rents rose 11.1% while inflation was 8.5%. That means rents gained roughly 2.6 percentage points on the general price level.
Rosario has also been firmer. Its average one-bedroom apartment recently reached roughly ARS 565,000. Rents were up 15.9% during the measured part of the year, about one percentage point above inflation, while the twelve-month real increase was 5.7%.
Those differences make sense under one national legal regime. Housing markets remain local. Buenos Aires had an unusually large stock of apartments that could return from vacancy, sale or temporary rental. Córdoba and Rosario have different construction pipelines, tenant populations, neighborhood structures and starting levels of supply.
When someone says “Argentina’s rents are rising after deregulation,” the first question should be where. The answer changes materially between Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Rosario.
| Market | Recent nominal rent trend | Compared with inflation | What is happening now? |
|---|---|---|---|
| CABA | +17.5% this year | Below inflation | Real rents falling slightly |
| GBA North | +12.9% | Well below inflation | Real rents falling |
| GBA West | +11.4% | Well below inflation | Real rents falling |
| GBA South | +11.7% | Well below inflation | Real rents falling |
| Córdoba | +11.1% in Q1 | Above inflation | Real rents rising |
| Rosario | +15.9% in latest 2026 reading | Slightly above inflation | Real rents rising |
Do Argentina’s rental indexes show what tenants actually pay?
Only partly. Argentina’s freshest rental indexes are excellent for tracking asking prices, but they do not tell us the full cost of every contract that tenants eventually sign.
Zonaprop measures advertised properties. CESO also monitors listings. These datasets are useful because they show what a person looking for an apartment encounters today and let us compare the same market over time.
Executed contracts are harder to observe systematically.
That gap became more important after deregulation because contracts can now differ much more. Two apartments advertised for ARS 700,000 can have completely different adjustment schedules. One might rise every three months with CPI, another every four months, while a third could use a different index or currency.
Deposits and other negotiated conditions can also vary.
CEPA has specifically warned that initial asking prices do not capture later adjustments over the life of the contract. We can be quite confident about the direction of new-listing prices and supply, while estimates of the average tenant’s full effective housing cost carry more uncertainty.
That is also why “Are rents falling?” needs a precise definition. The cleanest evidence currently tells us that new asking rents have fallen in real terms in Buenos Aires. It cannot prove that every existing tenant is paying less relative to income or inflation.
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Did deregulation just replace expensive starting rents with more frequent increases?
To a large extent, yes. Argentina’s new rental contracts often start closer to the current market price and then adjust much more frequently.
Under the old annual-adjustment system, a landlord operating in triple-digit inflation had to think far ahead. If prices doubled before the next permitted increase, the rent could lose half its purchasing power during the year.
A high starting price was one obvious defense.
Today, contracts commonly advertise CPI adjustments every three or four months. That gives landlords much less reason to load a full year of expected inflation into the opening rent.
The tenant experience changes as well. Instead of accepting one unusually high initial price and waiting twelve months for an adjustment, households can now face several smaller increases over the year.
That helps explain a strange feature of the current debate. The entry price can become more competitive while tenants simultaneously feel that “the rent keeps going up all the time.”
Both perceptions can describe the same contract.
Why does renting in Buenos Aires still feel so expensive?
Buenos Aires renting still feels expensive because real rents fell from an extreme level; they never fell far enough to become cheap relative to household income.
CESO’s recent CABA monitoring puts median asking rents around ARS 600,000 for a studio, ARS 700,000 for a two-room apartment and roughly ARS 1 million for a three-room apartment.
Those numbers remain heavy for lower-income households. In the same comparison, the minimum wage was about ARS 363,000. One minimum wage would therefore cover only around 60% of the median advertised studio rent before adding building fees, utilities or other housing expenses.
Median household income gives a less extreme comparison than the minimum wage, but affordability still looks stretched. CEPA’s work on Buenos Aires finds rental burdens frequently above the conventional 30% of household income used as a housing-stress benchmark.
Income growth also differs sharply between workers. INDEC’s latest available wage data showed the overall wage index up 36.9% year over year, but the aggregate mixes registered private workers, public workers and informal workers with very different trajectories. Unemployment was also 7.8% in the first quarter.
So a CABA apartment can become cheaper against the CPI while becoming harder to afford for a particular family whose salary rose more slowly.
| Affordability measure | Recent level | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Median CABA studio asking rent | ~ARS 600k | Already well above one minimum wage |
| Median CABA 2-room asking rent | ~ARS 700k | Around twice the minimum wage used in CESO’s comparison |
| Median CABA 3-room asking rent | ~ARS 1.0m | Requires a much stronger household income |
| Minimum wage in CESO comparison | ~ARS 363k | Covers only ~60% of a median studio rent |
| CABA renter households | 36.2% of households | A large share of the city depends on this expensive market |
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Are expensas making Buenos Aires rents look cheaper than they really are?
Yes. Building charges can add roughly another fifth to the advertised rent, so the headline rental index can understate the amount tenants actually need each month.
CESO has recently estimated average expensas at about 22.8% of advertised CABA rents.
Applied to an ARS 700,000 apartment, that ratio adds close to ARS 160,000 before electricity, gas, internet and other expenses. The household is suddenly looking at roughly ARS 860,000 before several everyday housing costs have even been counted.
Ordinary recurring building expenses are generally paid by the tenant, while extraordinary building expenses remain the landlord’s responsibility under Argentina’s current legal framework.
Utilities have also gone through major price adjustments as Argentina reduced subsidies and changed regulated tariffs. Those increases do not necessarily appear in a portal’s rental-price index.
For tenants, the practical question is the monthly cost of remaining in the apartment. Advertised rent captures only part of that bill.
Has deregulation made renting more attractive to Argentine landlords?
Yes. Rental returns have recovered enough to make long-term leasing much more appealing to owners than it was during the worst years of the old system.
CEPA’s Buenos Aires work shows how dramatically gross yields changed. Its estimates put the quarterly return on a studio at about 1.21%, compared with 0.52% five years earlier. For three-room apartments, the increase was from roughly 0.43% to 0.96%.
Zonaprop’s latest citywide calculation puts CABA’s gross annual rental yield around 5.8%. At that rate, an owner would need a little over 17 years of gross rent to equal the purchase price, ignoring vacancies, taxes, maintenance and other expenses.
Greater Buenos Aires currently sits around a similar range. In GBA North, Zonaprop estimates a gross annual yield just under 6%.
Córdoba offers considerably more. Its latest available index puts gross annual rental returns close to 7.8%, equivalent to roughly 13 years of gross rent to recover the purchase price.
Those figures help explain the supply response. Owners now have more freedom to protect rental income against inflation, while the return on renting has become respectable again.
| Rental investment market | Gross yield | Approx. years of gross rent to equal purchase price | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|---|
| CABA | ~5.8% | ~17.3 years | Renting has become more attractive again |
| GBA North | ~6.0% | ~16.8 years | Similar economics outside the city |
| Córdoba | ~7.8% | ~12.8 years | Much stronger gross rental return |
| CABA studio, CEPA quarterly measure | 1.21% vs. 0.52% five years earlier | — | Large recovery in landlord economics |
| CABA 3-room, CEPA quarterly measure | 0.96% vs. 0.43% | — | Improvement extends beyond small units |
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Why hasn’t the surge in rental supply made Buenos Aires cheap?
The easy supply gains came from bringing existing apartments back onto the market. Making Buenos Aires genuinely cheap would require more housing, stronger incomes or weaker demand.
That distinction is easy to miss when we see rental listings triple from their trough.
Owners could respond to deregulation almost overnight. An empty apartment could be advertised. A property waiting for sale could return to rental. A temporary rental could switch back to a two-year contract.
None of those moves increases the number of homes in Buenos Aires.
The next stage is harder because new buildings take years and construction has become expensive in dollar terms. Zonaprop’s latest CABA market data, using Cámara Argentina de la Construcción costs and the MEP exchange rate, show dollar construction costs more than doubling from their late-2023 level and sitting well above their long-run average.
Demand also remains deep. CEPA estimates that 36.2% of Buenos Aires households rent today, compared with 24% in 2003, while the share of owner households has fallen from 64% to 52%.
The mortgage revival has not changed that structure yet. Buenos Aires property transactions financed with mortgages have recovered from almost nonexistent levels, but the Colegio de Escribanos recently put mortgage-backed purchases at only 10.8% of total transactions.
Most renters therefore still cannot leave the rental market simply because mortgage lending has restarted.
Location adds another constraint. Zonaprop currently puts the average two-room rent around ARS 1.31 million in Puerto Madero and roughly ARS 656,000 in Lugano. More citywide supply reduces scarcity, but it cannot make desirable neighborhoods equally abundant.
Deregulation fixed a serious circulation problem in the existing housing stock. The remaining affordability problem is much more structural.
Was Argentina’s old Rental Law really the main reason rents became so expensive?
The old Rental Law clearly helped create the supply shortage, but Argentina’s inflation crisis played an even bigger role in pushing rents to extreme levels.
The supply evidence against the old regime is strong. Traditional Buenos Aires listings collapsed for several years, landlords had very limited ways to update rents during accelerating inflation, and supply rebounded immediately when those rules disappeared.
The IZA research strengthens that case by finding a large reform-related increase in listings rather than merely observing a coincidental recovery.
Prices are more complicated.
Argentina finished 2023 with consumer inflation above 200%. Landlords and tenants were trying to price multi-year agreements while the peso was losing purchasing power at extraordinary speed. Asking rents inevitably reflected that instability.
CEPA’s inflation-adjusted historical series adds useful context. After the dramatic rise and subsequent correction, real Buenos Aires rents moved back toward levels seen several years earlier rather than collapsing to unprecedented lows.
The old law made a bad macroeconomic environment worse. Annual adjustments became increasingly unworkable, owners withdrew supply and initial rents included protection against future inflation.
Removing those rules could never solve the wider monetary crisis by itself. That is why the biggest improvements after deregulation appeared in supply and real rent dynamics rather than in the complete disappearance of rent increases.
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So why are rents still rising in Argentina after deregulation?
Argentina’s rents are still rising in pesos because inflation never disappeared, while deregulation mainly reduced the extra cost created by scarce supply and rigid contracts. In Buenos Aires today, the evidence points to a successful supply reform paired with an affordability problem that remains unresolved.
Buenos Aires rental listings surged after deregulation, and the IZA study finds a large causal supply response around the reform. Asking-rent inflation then fell sharply from the extraordinary rates seen around the end of the old regime.
Currently, CABA rents are rising more slowly than consumer prices. The pattern is even stronger across GBA North, West and South, where real asking rents have fallen roughly 6% to 8% this year. Córdoba and Rosario are moving differently, which is why the national story cannot be reduced to one price index.
The reform also changed when tenants pay inflation. Instead of landlords protecting themselves with extremely high starting rents and long gaps between increases, many new contracts now adjust every few months. That produces more competitive entry prices but much more visible increases throughout the lease.
Affordability remains the weak point. Buenos Aires rents started from a very high base, expensas can add roughly another fifth to the advertised price, more than one-third of city households rent, construction remains expensive and mortgages still finance only a minority of property purchases.
The cleanest conclusion is this: saying that “rents are still rising after deregulation” is technically true in nominal pesos but gives the wrong impression about what has happened in Buenos Aires. Deregulation brought a large amount of housing back onto the market and pushed rents below inflation again. What it has not done is make housing cheap.
That is the apparent paradox. Argentina can have a better-functioning rental market, falling real rents in its largest metropolitan area and tenants who still feel squeezed at the same time.
OUR METHODOLOGY
We approached the question of why rents are still rising after deregulation by separating the debate into several parts: rental availability, nominal and inflation-adjusted prices, regional differences, affordability, contract mechanics, landlord incentives and longer-term housing constraints. Looking at those dimensions separately avoids drawing a conclusion from one rent index or one before-and-after comparison.
For each part, we prioritized the freshest observable evidence and checked it against longer historical series and independent sources. Official statistics were used for inflation, wages, employment and the legal framework; property-market indexes for asking rents, supply and rental yields; academic research for the effect of deregulation itself; and housing and transaction data for affordability and market structure.
As explained above, asking-price indexes are treated as measures of the entry rental market rather than as a complete measure of what every tenant ultimately pays. This matters more after deregulation because adjustment frequency, indexation, currency, deposits and other contract terms can now differ substantially between otherwise similar listings.
We did not combine unlike indicators into an artificial score. Instead, we looked for convergence across the evidence, checked where the results diverged, and compared the current market with both the immediate post-reform period and the years preceding deregulation. Buenos Aires was also compared with Córdoba and Rosario rather than being treated as a proxy for the entire country.
Key legal sources include Argentina’s DNU 70/2023, the current Civil and Commercial Code, and the updated text of Rental Law 27.551. For causal evidence around deregulation, we rely primarily on Martin Elfert and Stephan Thomsen’s IZA study of the Buenos Aires rental market and the Argentine government’s Rental Law impact assessment.
Current market conditions are drawn mainly from Zonaprop’s original indexes for CABA, GBA North, GBA West, GBA South, Córdoba and Rosario, together with its CABA rental-yield index. We use CEPA’s Buenos Aires rental-market research and CESO’s CABA rental report for affordability, expensas and longer-term market structure.
Inflation, wages and employment are checked against INDEC’s Consumer Price Index and INDEC’s labour and income indicators. Mortgage-backed property transactions are taken from the Colegio de Escribanos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, while construction-cost context comes from Zonaprop’s CABA market report using Cámara Argentina de la Construcción data and the MEP exchange rate.
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