Bloomberg: Apartment Vacancies Hit 23-Year High. It's Time To Haggle.
That's a serious drop from April, which is when this video said we were at a mere five-year high. If you're apartment-hunting, time to renegotiate the rent.
This is right in line with my own economic indicators, which are based on Craigslist. I've noticed that nice apartments that used to go within a day or two now linger for weeks as landlords keep dropping the asking prices. (Also, people are selling fine guitars at deep discounts. Just in case through some miracle, you can actually afford one.)
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. apartment vacancies rose to 7.8 percent in the third quarter, the highest since 1986, as rising unemployment reduced rental demand, Reis Inc. said.
Actual rents paid by tenants, known as effective rents, declined 2.7 percent from a year earlier, the New York-based property research firm said in a report today. Asking rents, or what landlords sought, fell 1.8 percent from a year earlier.
Job losses and falling wages are shrinking the pool of potential tenants. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in August, the highest since 1983, the Labor Department said Oct. 2.
Vacancies “continued to rise despite what has traditionally been a strong leasing period for apartment properties,” Victor Calanog, director of research at Reis, said in a statement. “Given the inherent seasonality of rental and lease-up patterns we expect fourth-quarter figures to be even weaker, implying that we may break historic vacancy levels by year-end 2009.”
The apartment vacancy rate was 7.7 percent in the second quarter and 6.2 percent in 2008’s third quarter, Reis said. Compared with the second quarter, asking rents fell 0.5 percent and effective rents fell 0.3 percent.
If you saw Keith's special comment tonight and didn't cry, good for you for not having a heart.
Say what you mean. Mean what you say. But don't say it mean.
"The insurance companies are at war with America...The health insurance cartel."
Indeed! Time to stock up on ammo while we still can, before all the teabaggers and RW NRA wackos buy it all up...
Thanks Keith.
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
wondered if it was just me, but Maddow seemed choked up too.
Worst since Ronald Reagan's second term.
but if I don't get a job by the end of next week, I will probably have to in order to pay the mortgage.
I really don't want to but it is about the only thing I have that is worth anything.
:(
Condolences. Remember, there are a lot of really fine guitars out there.
I'm about to sell mine - but I've been through this before, and I know there's another great guitar on the other side.
A former award-winning journalist and lifelong class warrior, keeping a jaundiced eye on the Washington elite.
So where are all these people living?
Interesting that all the data (unemployment, vacancies, housing prices, foreclosures, bankruptcies) are all at highs not seen since the 80's. Hmm, let's see. Who was running the show back then?
The people of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." J.K. Galbraith
Back home to mom's, shacking up, or living 4, 5, and 6 to a single apartment probably.
We moved up from an apartment to a "townhouse" in the same complex last year. Our old place sat for 10 months until the lights came on the other day.
I'm another person who thought foreclosures would be good for rental but my new neighbors are one of each demographic: next door is a refugee from a foreclosed house and her kid. Two down in our 4-plex is four kids in their twenties. I think there are a lot more of the latter appearing. As many as the landlord and/or local law will allow bundled together.
Being foreclosed on and apts. being at a 23 year Vacancy High, Where is everyone living? Are Multiple families doubling up in a single dwellings? are they on the streets?
Late,
QSE32
I am right there with you, where did these people go?
moving back in with parents, staying married or cohabiting while divorced, couch surfing.
And 1.8% isn't much of a drop in requested rent.
is that in this modern day of Christianity rules ALL, we have a ton more people "living in sin."
Pretty funny turn of events and completely beleivable. Can't wait for the Churchies explain themselves out of this one.
Late,
grmpysmrf
I have heard of several families moving in together, or back in with parents or grandparents. I also know some seniors who can no longer afford to live on their own, and they have had to move back in with their children.
We are in a full blown depression, and we have been since 2006. I don't give a shit what that stupid lying jackass Bernanke says, or the other "economist's" who work for Wall Street. Hell, they were still saying how great our economy was, while at the same time drawing up the paper's for their bailout from Bush.
My wife has five brothers. Every single one is unemployed - despite the fact they all have college degrees and decades worth of excellent work histories behind them. not one of them was unemployed a day in their life until chimpy the destroyer took over.
These were the people who were suppose to get rich thanks to NAFTA. Remember all them high-tech jobs?
Oh, and one other thing, F.U. Bill Clinton! Yes, this one IS Clinton's fault, depending on what you mean by is........
Rush Limbaugh is what a smart person thinks a stupid bigot sounds like.
are renting them - the renters get a house instead of an apartment to live in, and the home owner gets a big part of their mtg covered.
And single seniors are house sharing - that way they aren't alone and can have a nicer place than what they can afford by themselves.
Got a friend in SD who has two roomates in their two "spare" bedrooms. Right now, the rent coming in is their only income.
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
were again talking about a 'jobless recovery' and 15% unemployment being the new 'normal'.
these bubble people just can't see a fact for what it is.
Some stuff you can't make up!
These assholes will never get it. Even when the guillotine is on the back of their necks!
The people who are getting screwed now, are the college educated makers and shakers. Not the manufacturing sector crowd, but the ones who never thought they would be in the same boat with those "lowly" factory rats.
These are also the same types of people who start revolutions once they have had enough. I think another jobless recovery might finally push many over the edge.
Rush Limbaugh is what a smart person thinks a stupid bigot sounds like.
to look and sound relevant - but the fact is they can't. They are relatively well-to-do, if not outright wealthy, they have insurance, they live in beautiful homes and have luxurious lives - compared to the vast majority of us.
And it's like they sense they have no real concept of what it's like for us anymore and don't know quite what to do about it. Feel guilty? Smug? Empathic? Oblvious? Embarrassed?
They can afford to go to a great doctor whenever they want - who knew that would finally come out of the closet as the great American cultural caste classifier in the country that was supposed to be inherently classless?
But, now when they look out at the rest of the country, they are looking across the great divide of haves and have nots, and we're suddenly staring back with the full realization of the divide's ugliest implications: poverty is a potentially terminal condition, and now we're the poor.
The amazing thing about Olbermann tonight was how he confronted that great divide and refused to let it seperate him from the rest of us, or us from him.
Call your Congresscritters - insist on Medicare for All
Tent cities are popping up all over the U.S.
This is why, despite the public relations salesmanship of ideological defenders of them to convince us otherwise, Free Market Capitalists are NOT who you'd want to count on to march into a sinking economy and turn it around. That isn't what they do. They even have a conventional admonishment for it; "Never try to catch a falling knife."
Free Market Capitalists don't lead in these matters. They follow.
If 1000 vacant apartments are a good indicator of bargains at hand, Free Market Capitalists surmise, why not wait until there are 10,000 vacant apartments available and get an even greater bargain? Oh, wait...how about 100,000? And so they wait. And wait. For someone else to establish the bottom, the floor upon which that falling knife finally rests.
That's why the Federal Government becomes the reliable spender of last resort to turn around a sinking economy and not Free Market Capitalists. It has been so for every Depression and Recession in U.S. history. And, in every case, Free Market Capitalist ideologues whine and complain that we should all wait for Free Market Capitalists to march in and save the world instead of the "evil Government".
But they don't.
The San Francisco market vacancy is around 4- 5% (and in some neighborhoods , 1%). Rents will NEVER. GO. DOWN. HERE. UGH.
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