Our recent experience tells me that rents are certainly not going up. We recently sold our house in Escondido and needed to find a rental house in the Escondido-San Marcos area. We found that we were in a position to negotiate down the rent in almost every case.
I should add that the most amazing thing about the process was that every house we looked at, the owner would be cash-flow negative on a monthly basis, some severely negative.
I witnessed several situations where the owners / speculators are – in all likelihood – going to get creamed.
If anyone’s interested in the sordid details, I’ll post additional information.