Javier Milei Ended Rent Control. Now the Argentine Real Estate Market Is Coming Back to Life.
Martín López is an Argentine landlord, but in recent years he felt more like a nervous fugitive. Now based in Madrid, he spent much of 2022 and 2023 mired in anxiety and paperwork—not because he did anything immoral, but because Argentina’s rental laws made being a landlord a liability.
“Martín López” is an alias. Until late 2023, he rented out his two-bedroom apartment in Buenos Aires’ upscale Belgrano neighborhood through a tangle of short-term contracts, never fully sure whether his actions were legal. Argentina’s 2020 rent control law, repealed by President Javier Milei in December 2023, had loaded aboveground landlords with unbearable risks.
Many like Martín fled the formal rental market into legal limbo. Empty apartments, housing shortages, and backroom deals defined the sector in Buenos Aires. Tenants scrambled for scarce formal leases, while landlords twisted themselves into knots trying to extract value from their properties without breaking the law.
While planning his move to Spain, Martín wanted to rent out his apartment without dealing in pesos, Argentina’s ever-devaluing currency. “After consulting with five or six brokers, they told us the best option was to do ‘temporary,’ Airbnb-like contracts,” he explains.
That workaround brought its own headaches. “Once I left for Madrid, I had to sign a legal document to authorize my mother to sign these contracts on my behalf, as they had to be signed in person every three months.” By leasing in dollars and repeatedly renewing contracts with the same tenants, Martín was sidestepping the rent control law—a move that explains his reluctance to reveal his identity. One contract dispute with tenants would have brought him all sorts of legal problems.
Since Milei repealed Argentina’s rent control regulations, Martín’s desirable apartment, and thousands of others like it, have found a stable footing in a growing formal sector. “The ability to sign contracts in any currency and to any length reassured us that we can rent our place legally,” he says. When his tenants, escapees of the Russia-Ukraine war, confirmed they would also prefer to junk the hassle of renewing leases every three months, the apartment reentered the formal market.
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.
Argentina’s Tenancy Rent Controls Experiment
In 2020, as the pandemic raged and economic uncertainty loomed, Argentina’s Peronist government introduced sweeping controls over both rental prices and lengths of tenancies. The idea was to provide renters security against unexpected, sharp rent hikes.
But the rules were stifling. Tenancies had to last at least three years, and annual rent increases within those contracts were capped to a weighted average of inflation and wage growth; the figures were calculated by Argentina’s beleaguered central bank. While landlords could reset rents between leases, ejecting a tenant early was virtually impossible. Worse, rents had to be paid in pesos—a currency in free fall, suffering spiraling inflation.
On paper, these controls didn’t look as draconian as older forms of rent control, where prices were held below market rates perennially. After all, landlords could reset prices every three years. In practice, these price controls and mandatory minimum contract lengths created huge new risks for landlords. Got an undesirable tenant? Or maybe your property’s rent is lagging as market demand surges? Tough luck. You were stuck with your three-year contract and with rents increasingly divorced from the property’s value.
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