National vacancy near 8.5 percent is an average of thousands of submarkets, and averages hide the thing you actually buy. A national peak is consistent with a specific submarket getting worse for another eighteen months, which is exactly what those two cranes mean. The forecast decline toward roughly 7.5 percent by 2030 comes from absorption, meaning net units leased, overtaking deliveries, meaning net units completed. In the most oversupplied markets that crossover comes early. In the ones where construction started late, it comes later.
So the useful version of your question is narrower than the national number. How many units are under construction within a couple of miles, when do they deliver, and what are they asking? A new lease-up giving two months free will pull tenants from your 1990s building whether or not the country as a whole has turned.
As for whether recovery is already priced in, values are still 20 to 30 percent under the 2022 peak while the cost to build the same building has climbed nearly 39 percent since 2020. That gap is the argument, and it's a real one, but it's not a promise. It says buying below replacement cost gives you some protection because nobody can add competing supply cheaply at today's costs. It doesn't say rents will do anything on a particular schedule.
The part that catches people who focus on the market story is the debt. A deal can be right on rents and still fail because the loan matures before the recovery arrives and the refinance doesn't clear. When you read the next memorandum, find the loan term and the assumed exit cap rate before you read the rent projections, and ask the sponsor what happens to investor equity if the exit cap is half a point wider than they assumed.
