Sept. 1, the dreaded day when so many Boston-area renters move into new apartments or begin new lease cycles, is still almost seven months away.
But for so many of those renters, they are already having the annual renewal conversation with their landlord — if they didn’t already sign a new lease months ago for September 2026.
For tenants, the tradition of renewing a lease long before it’s up can be anywhere from a nuisance to a serious issue as they plan future living arrangements. But with the high level of demand in the local real estate market, that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
“It’s not like any brokerage or anybody can change it,” said Demetrios Salpoglou, a realtor, developer, property manager and the CEO of real estate platform Boston Pads. “It’s too big and it has its own momentum.”
Though every landlord varies, and there are always a few apartments left on the market up through move-in day, anyone who has searched for a Sept. 1 unit in the Boston area knows they have to start looking early in the year.
Once they move in, though, they might not have long before they have to start thinking about doing it all over again.
MassLive heard from renters who had been asked as early as November, just two months after moving in, whether they intended to stay for another year.
“Tenants are being asked to renew long before they know what’s going on in their lives. I wouldn’t consider it a reasonable time for tenants to start thinking about when to move on,” said state Rep. Tackey Chan, D-2nd Norfolk, who has sponsored a bill in the Legislature that would regulate how far in advance landlords can force their tenants to sign a lease.
In some cases, he said, constituents have told him they have been asked about their plans nearly a year in advance, when it’s not always possible to know what life will look like.
Though the Quincy lawmaker does not rent his home, he gave his own situation as an example. He lives with his mother, who has health issues, which means things can change unexpectedly, and being locked into a lease for more than a year would not give him the flexibility to move if needed.
Chan’s bill would prohibit landlords from requiring a tenant to sign a lease more than three months before the end of the current lease.
Other renters say they have signed on for another year in their apartment only to find themselves stuck when facing a job loss, a breakup or another unexpected change.
It can be a particular challenge when a lease renewal also includes a rent increase, as a tenant might be able to afford the rent when they sign, but could have a change in employment or other financial changes by the time the increase actually kicks in.
One Reddit user recently wrote in a Boston housing subreddit that her landlord set a Dec. 1 deadline to decide whether she would stay in her South End apartment, where her current lease runs out on Sept. 1 of this year. She wrote that she was “flabbergasted” by the timeline, and because her current job contract only ran until June, she didn’t know if she would still be employed at the same company in September.
“Seeing as my employment is up in the air, it wouldn’t be in my best interest to renew the lease, which would keep me in this apartment for almost another two years, and I don’t feel like I’m in a place to make that kind of commitment,” she wrote. “I completely went into a spiral … because it set in for me that I was gonna have to do a stressful apartment hunt all over again (if I was able to keep my job and stay in Boston).”
Salpoglou said the Boston apartment market follows a strict schedule because of the large number of college students in the area. When students return to the city in mid-January after their winter break, he said, they’re “off to the races,” as most want to find an apartment before final exams at the end of the spring semester.
That means the period from January to April is one of the busiest times for the area’s rental market, and landlords want to be ready.
“It runs like a fine Swiss watch in terms of its precision,” Salpoglou said of the real estate market. “There’s these waves that are highly syncopated, because they’ve been built over many, many decades.”
To encourage tenants to meet the early deadlines, some landlords have even begun offering lower rent increases if they sign by a certain date — or, conversely, threatening a higher increase if they don’t.
This is most common among large or corporate landlords who manage many units, Salpoglou said.
“It really becomes very time-consuming to manage that many tenants,” he said. “So the bigger the landlord, the more they’re probably inclined to say, ‘Look, I won’t raise your rent if you sign right now,’ because they’re trying to just wrap everything up and get everything organized. It’s a time-money-value thing.”
Katie McCann, an organizer with the advocacy group City Life/Vida Urbana, said she has seen landlords use this strategy as an “intimidation tactic” to get tenants to “feel like they have no option but to agree to something really quickly.”
In recent years, McCann said she has seen more leases containing “holdover clauses,” which offer a modest rent increase at first but lock in a much higher rate that kicks in later.
“These large corporate investors are really doing whatever they can to pressure tenants to agree to these really unaffordable rent increases, whether it’s directly and immediately or whether it’s something that’s going to take effect slightly after,” she said.
