Just Like Apartments, Single-Family Rentals Going Strong

The Wall Street Journal reports that the business of investing in portfolios of distressed single-family homes has come to the point in its current cycle that investors who got into the game early are beginning to cash out. Read More.

Some profit-taking in this area makes sense in light of the fact that the Census Bureau has just reported that 1.07 million new householdswere created during the year ending September, 2012.  For 2008-2011 new household formation was averaging 650,000.  The 1.15 million is nearly back to the 1.25 million average households forming before the Great Recession.

Single-family rental housing is the subject of a brief in the latest edition of Units magazine. Simply stated: demand is outstripping supply.  Families who have lost their homes to foreclosure are generally unable to qualify for new mortgages, so they seek out single family rentals and demand has increased by more than 2 percent in some markets.

According to CoreLogic, Inc., without additional single family rentals coming to market, the entire supply of for-lease houses available in August would have been gone in about 2.6 months, that compares to a 3.2 month supply a year earlier.