Before Mountain View landed rent control a few years ago, my rent was being increased 10% year over year - I had enough after 3 years and moved to Sunnyvale where my rent was $50 more a month for an extra bedroom and 300-400 sqft extra.

Interestingly, my rent has remained stable ever since moving - guess it's possible to have much better luck with smaller landlords.

In the US, it is very common the past decade or so.

I'm in bumblefudge-nowhere-Midwest USA, and even we've averaged 10% yearly rent increases, for more than 5+ years now. Every top-20 metro area I've looked at, has had it worse than us on rental price increases.

It really depends on the landlord. I just renewed my lease on a single-family home in a relatively hot market with no price increase. Of the 7 or 8 different units I've rented across 4 different states, only 2 of them had landlords that routinely nudged the rent upward at lease renewal. My personal experience is that unless someone is really working to maximize profit per unit, they're usually content to leave well enough alone, and only raise rates when the unit goes empty. I know multiple people who've rented for 15+ years with no increase in rent.

Indexes and aggregations may show something, but it's important to remember that they're lossier than many people appreciate. You'd have to dig into the data to learn how representative it may or may not be. Since small-time landlords are hard to collect data from, most of these city rental indexes are probably relying on large-scale apartment landlords who are constantly trying to squeeze maximum price-per-unit. I'd say you'd do well to take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been back in the USA for more than 3 years now and haven’t experienced this yet. I’ve lived in hot housing markets also (LA and then the Seattle area).

Seattle's rent, specifically, has risen an average of 8% year-over-year for the past 4 years now. (According to Zillow's rental data - https://www.zillow.com/downtown-seattle-seattle-wa/home-valu...).

And I strongly suspect these numbers are below real-world ones (they use Zillow-listing advertised price, which like most advertisements, are usually slightly lower than the actual price a real person would have to pay)

I’ve been told that supply “caught” up in 2017 when I moved into downtown Bellevue, so the market has been weak on apartments (indeed everyone was offering incentives). Anyways, as anecdotal, we aren’t paying more than 7% more for our third leasing period in 2019 as we were in our first leasing period in 2017.