Local news

Valley rents climb again as vacancy falls under two percent

A one-bedroom in Northampton now lists at $1,780 on average, up 9 percent in a year.

By Marisol Reyes · July 21, 2026

The average one-bedroom apartment listed in Northampton this summer is asking $1,780 a month, up 9 percent from $1,633 a year ago, and the rental vacancy rate across Hampshire County has fallen to 1.8 percent.

The numbers come from the Valley Housing Data Project, which has tracked listings and landlord surveys in the three counties since 2011. Its midyear report went out to member towns last week.

A 1.8 percent vacancy rate is the lowest the project has recorded. It was 2.4 percent last summer and 4.1 percent in 2019. Anything under 3 percent is generally considered tight enough that tenants stop having choices.

"At 4 percent a tenant can walk away from a bad apartment," said Nadia Fortin, who directs the project. "At 1.8 they take the bad apartment, and they take the rent increase that comes with it, because the alternative is a room in Chicopee and a car they do not have."

The numbers by town

Northampton is the most expensive in the survey. A studio averages $1,395, a one-bedroom $1,780 and a two-bedroom $2,290. Amherst runs close behind on two-bedrooms at $2,410, which Fortin attributes to landlords pricing by the bed for student groups rather than by the unit.

Easthampton one-bedrooms average $1,540, up 11 percent, the biggest jump in the survey. Holyoke is at $1,190 and Greenfield at $1,105, both up about 6 percent. Springfield one-bedrooms average $1,320.

Median household income in Hampshire County rose 3.1 percent over the same year.

The project also counted how long listings sit. A Northampton one-bedroom under $1,600 came off the market in a median of four days. Over $2,000, the median was 26 days. Fortin said the cheap end is not really a market anymore, it is a queue.

What it does to a household

Dolores Achterberg has rented the same second-floor unit on Hawley Street in Northampton for six years. Her rent went from $1,290 to $1,475 in 2024 and to $1,620 this June, a 10 percent jump in one letter.

"He is not a bad landlord, that is the thing," Achterberg said. "He fixed the radiator in a day last winter. He also handed me a letter in April and told me the taxes and the insurance went up and this is what it costs now. I looked for two weekends. There was nothing under sixteen that was not a basement."

She works at a veterinary practice in Hadley and said rent is now about 46 percent of her take-home pay. The standard threshold for cost burden is 30 percent.

Landlords say the pressure is real on their side too. Bernard Kotula owns eleven units across three buildings in Florence and raised rents an average of 7 percent this year.

"My insurance went up 31 percent in two years and my property tax went up nine," Kotula said. "I put a roof on the Maple Street building in the fall, $41,000. I am not apologizing for the increase and I am also not getting rich. The people getting rich bought in 2013."

Not much is getting built

Hampshire County permitted 214 new housing units in the twelve months through June, against 189 the year before. Fortin's estimate of what the county actually needs to hold vacancy steady is around 600 a year.

Of those 214, 38 are deed-restricted affordable. The rest are market rate, and 96 of them are in one Hadley project off Route 9 that is not expected to take tenants until spring 2028.

The pipeline is thin partly because construction financing is expensive and partly because the towns that have the sewer capacity mostly do not have the zoning, and the towns that have the zoning mostly do not have the sewer. Northampton passed an accessory dwelling unit ordinance in 2024 and has issued 31 permits under it, which Fortin called useful and small.

What the towns are doing about it

Northampton's housing trust has $2.4 million and is taking proposals through September 30 for projects that produce units under 80 percent of area median income. Easthampton is studying a real estate transfer fee on sales over $1 million, which would need state approval and would not produce money before 2028.

Amherst is considering a rental registry that would require landlords to file rents annually. Landlords are against it. Fortin said the data would be genuinely better than what she has, since her figures come from listings and listings skew toward the units that turn over.

None of that moves the 1.8 percent this year, and Fortin said so plainly at the presentation.

If you are looking now

The valley's leases mostly turn over on September 1, and the listings for that date are largely gone by early August. The next real wave is the December and January turnover, which is smaller and colder and where the deals are.

Tenants facing an increase should know that Massachusetts requires a landlord to give written notice equal to one rental period, so a month for a month-to-month tenancy, before a rent increase takes effect. A lease cannot be raised mid-term.

The Hampshire County housing hotline at 413-555-0106 runs weekdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and handles both emergency assistance applications and questions about notice and eviction. The Valley Housing Data Project posts the full midyear report, including the town-by-town tables, on its website the first week of August.