Apartment vacancies in the U.S. dropped in the second quarter from the previous three months, the first quarterly improvement in two years, as private-sector job growth boosted demand for rental housing, Reis Inc. said.
The vacancy rate for apartment properties was 7.8 percent, down from a 30-year high of 8 percent in the first quarter and up from 7.7 percent a year earlier, according to a report today by the real estate research firm. First-quarter vacancies were the highest since 1980, when Reis began tracking the data.
“The apartment sector is on the path towards recovery,” Victor Calanog, director of research at New York-based Reis, said in today’s report…
Landlords’ asking rents rose 0.4 percent from the first quarter and were down 0.7 percent from a year earlier. Effective rents, or what tenants actually paid, climbed 0.7 percent from the prior quarter and were unchanged from a year earlier.
This won’t come as a surprise to those of you who have been watching residential REIT stocks during the past year or so.
Dr. Duru