"Recovery is the magic word here," Michael Boujoulian, managing director of Alliance Residential, tells GlobeSt.com about the Boston market. Thanks to a strong presence of tech and life science companies and a supply-demand imbalance, the New England region has already bounced back from the pandemic-related disruption.

"The tenant's market has come back to a landlord's market, and that is really just a function of supply-and-demand and where rents are," says Boujoulian. "In a lot of places, we are up to full occupancy and at pre-pandemic rents or even higher."

Before the pandemic, supply was already exceeding demand for apartments. As a result, the city didn't have the capacity to absorb migration from the CBD or from other nearby metros. The kept the market stable. "There wasn't enough vacancy in the suburbs to absorb the urban population, so the 10 to 25 mile migration out of the CBD was constrained by our inherent supply problems," says Boujoulian. "We couldn't have absorbed 10,000 new people. We just didn't have the capacity."