In our recent post, “Fears of An Apartment Exodus” we shared our views around the significant shortage of affordable housing in this country and why it’s unlikely that “everyone” will leave their apartments in the city for a single-family home in the suburbs. Supply constraints make an apartment exodus impossible in practice – we can’t push a button and automatically have millions of new homes – it also ignores the issue of affordability when demand exceeds supply. Millions of apartment residents would probably move to a home today, either to rent or to buy, if they could afford it. The

As enhanced unemployment benefits have now expired, we’ll continue to closely monitor delinquency trends across our portfolio. There are a lot of dramatic headlines out there, and not just from attention-seeking press outlets. For example, the most recent Household Pulse Survey from the US Census Bureau showed that just over 1/3 (34%) of respondents nationally had little or no confidence in their ability to pay their rent next month. Critically, however, the problem is that national and even statewide data can be irrelevant to our specific properties. And surveys reflect views that often conflict with actions. We prefer to focus

Over the past month, there’s been no shortage of articles in the popular press describing how COVID has affected consumer’s housing preferences. Broadly speaking, the narrative describes a rush from apartments in the city to single-family homes in the suburbs. Taken to the extreme, a major shift in demand trends would present problems to apartment investors like us. Therefore, we wanted to dig into the data a bit and share some of our initial thoughts. There’s no doubt that our new reality has shifted renters’ preference for single-family homes at the margin. In a global pandemic where work from home

We and our partners have remained intensely focused on operations and tenant engagement since early March. For now, our on-site property management teams have done a great job navigating the operational challenges of COVID. We’ve found ways to manage work requests, rent collections, and leasing engagement within the constraints of social distancing. According to the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), collections have been running in the low 90s across the US. While lower than the comparable periods in 2019, this is much better than we and others in the industry feared at the onset of the crisis. This data is