Javier Milei's Rental Market Deregulation

Across Buenos Aires and beyond, Milei's deregulation has vastly improved the rental landscape for tenants too. Just 18 months ago, Bruno Panighel, a 29-year-old financial consultant from Córdoba, was struggling to find an apartment with his girlfriend. "I set alerts on all of the major rental websites of Argentina. You could barely find a hundred one- or two-bedroom apartments in all of Buenos Aires," he recalls. Worse still, the few options available were painfully expensive. "Prices were so high that in many cases it was cheaper to live at a hotel. I made the calculations myself," Panighel says.

With the 2020 rent control law now scrapped, apartments have poured back into Buenos Aires' rental market, offering a plethora of new options. On Zonaprop, one of Argentina's largest real estate platforms, traditional rental listings have skyrocketed—from 5,500 before the reform to 15,300 today, a staggering 180 percent rise. A third of that increase occurred within just one month of Milei's deregulation.

Real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) rents have fallen, short-term workarounds are declining, and tenants are finding properties suited to their needs. Panighel and his partner now live in a two-bedroom apartment with a long balcony under a yearlong lease. Slowly but surely, the city is coming back to life for those seeking a place to call home.

That’s one excerpt from my long-read Reason magazine feature article with Marcos Falcone on the story of Argentina’s rent controls and their subsequent abolition under Javier Milei.

You can read the full article here. Much more detail at the link.