Absolutely they are! We're not talking complete vacancy, but 10% is the bottom of what I see for new buildings in my midwest city. These are built less than 10 years ago, and several have 25+% even after all that time. It seems that they're willing to let vacancies happen instead of lower rent rates.

Anecdotal obviously, but the closest one to me has been consistently over 50% empty due to bad construction and design, with no interest in fixing it to fill in the leaking units. Another 90 unit one has had trouble renting at the "luxury apartment" rates they were built to get because they looked landlord special day 1. They haven't lowered rents, only left units vacant.

> It seems that they're willing to let vacancies happen instead of lower rent rates

Anecdotally (as well), no small-time landlord I know wants vacancies over accepting lower rents. Almost all of them, however, would prefer a vacancy over getting a problem tenant who will be late in rent, not pay at all, or trash the place. This effect is especially strong in places with strong tenant protection laws.

Professional management companies of big apartments might be different.

In some cases. Real estate is not something you can do hands off management of. Historic attempts to outsource have tended to fail because it is really easy for management companies to say something needs more work than it really does and drain all the profits. As such if you know a property in a different city is going to go up the smart things to do is buy it and leave it empty while paying taxes - this is cheaper than fixing the roof, risking bad tenants and all the other things that a long term investment requires. This really only works if you hold for only a couple years though, otherwise the taxes/interest will eat your profit.

Note that the above limitations also limit how much can be invested this way. Most property won't go up by enough to be worth the investment costs.