The 2026 FIFA World Cup won’t just take over stadiums. In some U.S. cities hosting matches, it has also taken over the MLS.
In the weeks leading up to the tournament, real estate agents in host cities like Boston and Miami are watching listings vanish at an unusual rate, short-term rental inquiries spike from international callers, and the normal rhythms of the late-spring and summer market get bent around a soccer schedule.
The disruption is uneven by city, but in both places, Realtors say the World Cup’s fingerprints are all over their markets.
Skipping the spring market to host the World Cup
Eric Rollo, vice president of Greater Boston at The Agency, said he started noticing the pattern in March. A seller in South End had been unlisted since then, pulling the home off the market because her family needed the house for the World Cup.
“I told her she was going to miss the spring market,” Rollo told Inman. “She said, yeah, but I need it for the World Cup.”
Rollo tracks cancellations and withdrawals through his ILS and said the volume has become impossible to ignore. In the last week, his system went from generating one or two cancellation alerts per day to one or two per hour.
“That’s unusual,” he said, “because usually our market carries through around the 4th of July before you start seeing people pull stuff off.”
The geographic pressure extends beyond the city limits. Rollo said that homebuying and selling activity in Foxborough, home to Gillette Stadium, the Boston-area World Cup venue, will essentially stall for the duration of the tournament.
Boston will host seven matches, including a quarterfinal. Haiti will play Scotland in the first match on June 13.
Rollo pointed to the Brazil-France friendly on March 26, when Route 1 in Foxborough shut down for more than half a day. With games scheduled every other day, showings near the stadium corridor will be close to impossible.
“In Boston, we’re used to it emptying out this time of year with all the college kids leaving,” Rollo said. “But now it’s filling back in. Just getting around is going to make the real estate market intensely difficult over the next three or four weeks.”
Short-term rentals come with complications
Many Boston-area homeowners are looking to capitalize on a surge in short-term rental demand.
Airbnb data from April shows Dorchester is the fastest-growing Boston neighborhood for World Cup stays, with bookings up 122 percent year over year for the tournament window, compared to Q1 2026 reservations to the same period last year.
But Rollo cautioned that short-term rentals in Boston can be complicated. Downtown Boston condo owners near South Station, where the commuter rail to Gillette Stadium originates, risk running afoul of their condo docs if they list without checking.
Boston’s short-term rental ordinance also caps stays at 28 days, limits listings to owner-occupied units, and requires hosts to register with the city and verify the property as their primary residence.
“The spirit of the law was for longer-term investors,” Rollo said, referring to the portfolios of investors buying up clusters of condos for full-time Airbnb use. The rules weren’t written with the one-off “someone’s coming for a week because of the World Cup” scenario in mind.
“You’re rolling the dice on fines and whether that cost-benefit works,” Rollo said.
And for owners who rent out their properties and leave town, there’s another risk entirely: rowdy tournament renters who treat a stranger’s home like a venue. “You have to come back and look your neighbors in the eye,” Rollo said.
Welcome to Miami
In Miami, the calculus runs differently. The city is filling in, not emptying out, and the vibe is excitement.
Anna M. Uribe, a Miami Beach-based agent for The Agency, said the bulk of her World Cup inquiries are for short-term rentals and are coming from people in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, countries with teams in the tournament and deep soccer cultures.
They typically filter in through local agents who post to a specialized group chat for short-term rental brokers.
Miami, which is hosting seven matches between June 15 and July 18, has seen nightly short-term rental demand spike as much as 118 percent year over year on some match days, according to AirDNA data.
Miami is, of course, no stranger to hosting massive events. The Miami Grand Prix, a Formula One motor race, was held in May. Miami has also hosted the Super Bowl 11 times, which is tied with New Orleans for the most in NFL history.
But Uribe said the World Cup draws a broader audience.
“With Formula One, you tend to get more locals or people from places that already host F1 races — Monaco, Mexico — because they’re used to seeing it in their own country,” Uribe said. “The Super Bowl is huge, but it’s national. The World Cup is truly international, so the audience is much larger and more diverse.”
While residents in other U.S. host cities might be dreading the traffic caused by the World Cup, Uribe said most Miami residents aren’t trying to escape it. “Miami has such a diverse population that people genuinely have the fan spirit,” Uribe said. “They want to be part of it.”
Uribe’s brother and sister-in-law are flying in from Dallas. His two best friends and their wives are flying in from Colombia to attend the Colombia-Portugal match. Uribe’s Brazilian friend, who lives in Miami, is flying to Kansas City to see Argentina play.
“People will go wherever the games are,” Uribe said. “In Boston, maybe it’s more of an American-resident mindset — too much commotion. But here, people are excited. It’s going to be a big party.”
The longer-tail real estate effects
Beyond the short-term rental surge, both agents pointed to a longer-tail real estate effect: the World Cup as a buyer pipeline.
In Miami, Uribe said many of the international visitors arriving for the tournament have never been to the city or have visited only once or twice. Some leave curious about the market, and some go further.
“They get that bug — oh my God, it’s so nice here — and they decide to either rent something temporarily while they feel out the market, or they decide to buy,” she said. “It’s a real eye-opener for real estate.”
Rollo flagged a similar dynamic for Boston. The city has a history of international buyers purchasing homes for college students, then converting those properties into investments. The World Cup, he said, could reignite that pattern.
“You have people coming from all over the world who get to explore Boston and maybe say, ‘I could see myself buying a second home here,'” Rollo said.
He also noted another potential benefit from the transit investment Massachusetts has made around the tournament. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) has increased service for the World Cup, with direct trains, as it does for New England Patriots football games.
“I think this is almost a proof of concept for them to increase trains to and from Gillette Stadium on smaller event days, too,” Rollo said. “And it could extend to the Xfinity Center in Mansfield for concerts, since Mansfield has a T station. This is a test case: can we alleviate automobile traffic by ramping up commuter rail service?”
The loss of listings in Boston due to the World Cup will likely be temporary. Rollo expects a chunk of the withdrawn listings to return after the 4th of July or cluster around Labor Day, carrying through mid-November.
The timing compression adds up. He’s already been saying that Memorial Day this year felt like the 4th of July. The World Cup accelerated the calendar.
“When fireworks fly, the real estate market dies,” Rollo said. “This year, it already happened early, and the World Cup had a lot to do with that.”
