Estate agents in Buenos Aires reported a rapid increase in apartments offered for long-term rent on January 12, 2024, barely two weeks after President Javier Milei's emergency decree repealed Argentina's rental law. The Argentine Real Estate Chamber told El Cronista that the stock in its count had risen from a little over 400 units in 2023 to more than 800. Brokers also reported lower asking prices for some newly negotiated leases. These were industry observations in one city, not a national census or a guarantee that tenants' housing costs had fallen.
The change is an unusually direct test of Milei's argument that removing controls can bring withheld supply back to market. His Decree 70/2023 took effect on December 29, 2023, repealing the earlier rental framework and returning contracts to broader civil-law rules. The government did not build new apartments in a fortnight. Rather, landlords who had resisted the previous rules could advertise existing units under different terms.
More choice, different contracts
The chamber's Alejandro Bennazar described supply rising day by day. El Cronista reported that agents were negotiating rents in pesos, often with quarterly adjustments, instead of the three-year terms prescribed under the former law. One broker said asking prices on contracts with monthly increases could be 20% to 30% below comparable November and December offers. Another reported discounts for annual payment in advance. Such comparisons need care: a lower starting rent paired with more frequent indexation can yield a different total bill over the life of a lease. A cash-rich tenant able to prepay a year has bargaining power that a household living from one paycheck to the next does not.
The rental market had been particularly distorted by the old restrictions and by inflation. Owners could prefer short stays, dollar-denominated listings or withholding a property to signing a long fixed contract in rapidly depreciating pesos. The early jump in advertisements therefore speaks to owners' willingness to return, rather than proving that housing suddenly became affordable. The January figures came from brokers with a commercial interest in a more active market; they should not be confused with transaction-level prices paid by all renters.
Who benefits from flexibility?
The government could point to additional listings as an early gain from deregulation. For tenants, greater choice may make it easier to find a flat, but bargaining over deposit terms, currency and the frequency of rent changes creates a different risk. A landlord can price inflation into a shorter adjustment cycle; the tenant must plan for it. Comparing a peso rent with a dollar quote or a monthly adjustment with a quarterly one requires more than checking the first advertised payment. Buenos Aires is also not a proxy for provinces with different incomes and property markets.
A more rigorous IZA study published in September 2025 used weekly Buenos Aires data from 2023 and 2024 and found a substantial revival of supply alongside falling nominal and inflation-adjusted rents in the short term. Its authors, Martin Elfert and Stephan Thomsen, expressly called their conclusions preliminary in Argentina's volatile economy. That later research supports a short-run supply response; it does not establish that every renter gained or that the effects would persist indefinitely.
What to watch
The consequential test was not the number of listings in January alone, but whether more long-term leases would be signed at rents that households could sustain as inflation and wages changed. The repeal made that outcome more dependent on negotiation and market conditions. For investors, the early figures suggested idle housing stock could return without a construction boom. For renters, the same experiment replaced a predictable statutory formula with the terms they could secure from an owner. Both sides of that trade-off matter when judging a housing reform.
