I'm not planning to move out of my place until next year but to think ahead, what part of the year has the highest amount of rented apartments being available?

Is there a seasonal pattern or is it random and luck to find a great deal and a great apartment?

People with kids tend to move during the summer, so their kids don't have their school year interrupted. Therefore, if you are in that sort of a market, most unit come up for rent in the spring and summer.

If you wait until autumn or winter there are fewer units available, but you can sometimes get better deals because the landlord knows they will be hard to rent until the next summer.

If you're not looking at the very high end of the market, you'll likely be looking at apartments or houses owned by individuals (rather than a single landlord for the whole complex). There may be a bit of seasonality in this, but for the most part, there's so much excess supply of rentals, but the prices don't vary so much with the seasons. The bigger contributors to rent increases are inflation and general residential real estate market appreciation.

The bigger contributors to rent increases are inflation and general residential real estate market appreciation.

Or.... on the opposite, much reduced expat population to push up rent prices... aging buildings.... landlords desperate to rent their property to pay increasing mortgage payments... "general residential real estate market DEpreciation" ??