By Mark Pruner
The Greenwich rental market doesn’t get talked about much, but it actually has more transactions than our single-family home market has. It has more rentals in boom times and, even more in bad times. So far in 2026, rental inventory is staying tight with only 122 rental available now, which is more pro-landlords for the landlord who have rentals on the market. At the same time, we ended 2025 with slightly fewer closed rentals and these rentals stayed on the market for longer before renting, which is more pro-buyer.
What explains this is some statistical sleight of hand, which if you were reading closing you may have noticed. Our market in 2025 was a smidge slower than in 2024, particularly in the fourth quarter. We had fewer rentals in 2025 with 733, while we had 750 rentals in 2024 or a drop of 2%. Our days on market also indicated a slower market compared to 2024 where rentals stayed on for an average 42 days on market compared to 60 days on market in 2025.
The sleight of hand in the first paragraph was to compare 2025 rental to the first part of 2026. Our market in 2026 has picked up with our days on market dropping to only 39 days on market. Through the first two weeks of March 2026, we have had 131 rentals. This rate of rentals will go up as the year goes along.
When you look at rentals by month, it is a sine wave just like single family home sales. Unlike the single family home market, this sine wave is much flatter for rentals. Bottomline just about every month, except December, is a decent month to list a rental, particularly under $6,000.
When you look at where our rentals are, they are in every area of town. Most of our apartments, condos and townhouses rentals are concentrated within a half mile of the Post Road and also on the west side of town in Byram, Pemberwick and Glenville. In the larger zones, one acre and above, most rentals are single family home rentals with the occasional garage apartment and carriage house.
For the first nine months of 2025 our rental market was hotter than 2024 but fell off in the 4th quarter. We finished with fewer rentals, more days on market and a lower percentage rental price to original list price. Inflation and demand did put the average rental price up by 4% in 2024. The average price per square foot was up 6%. Our average rental price/sf is up 54% since our pre-Covid year of 2019.
We are still not back to our 19-year median number of rentals, which is 788 rentals per year. In fact, 2025 was our third lowest number of rentals in the last 19 years. Our demand is down a little from 2024. This is more from lack of inventory than it is from lack of demand as shown by the increasing prices and days of market that are still below our average.
Listings are down in every area of town, particularly in Old Greenwich. Traditionally, many of our OG rentals are north of the Post Road in condos and the smaller R-7 zone off of Sound Beach Avenue Extension. Riverside inventory is also down as is South of the Parkway and South of the Post Road, i.e., everything in central Greenwich from the Merritt on down.
The nice thing is that we have a few more rental listings available at our lower end than we had last year. Then again, we only have 3 listings in 2025 under $2,000 compared to 0 listings in September 2025. Our biggest drop by far is in the $6,000 to $8,000 price range where listings are down 63%. This price range is common in the R-7 zones of Riverside and Old Greenwich.
When you look at rentals by price since 2019, you can see the dramatic drop in rentals under $2,000 and even more so from $2,000 – $4,000. In 2025, our rentals in the next price range from $4,000 – 6,000 took a jump up. They were also historically higher in $6,000 – 8,000 price range. Much of this is due to inflation as what used to rent for $4,000 now rents for $5,000 and the same for $5,000 rentals now renting for $6,000.
At the high-end over $20,000 per month, we are down from 11 listings in September 2025 to only 7 in March 2026. We did have a few more rentals over $20,000 last year as the stock market is up. The result is that people are buying and renting some very nice houses. I’m presently working with two clients; one looking for rentals over $15,000 and the other looking over $25,000. Both are young couples from the city.
As to the future, the economy and black swans will be significant factor. If we have good economic news high-end rentals will go up. Bad news and all rentals go up as people put off buying houses.
Mark Pruner is a sales executive on the Greenwich Streets Team of Compass Connecticut. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or mark.pruner@compass.com.
