U.S. apartment leasing bounced back in 3rd quarter, led by a resurgence in the nation’s Sun Belt.The occupied apartment count across the 150 largest U.S. markets climbed by 146,517 units, on net, in the July through September time frame.
ATTOM Data Solutions’ most recent U.S. Home Sales Report shows that homeowners who sold in the second quarter of 2020 had owned their homes an average of 7.95 years. According to the report, that number is up slightly from 7.85 years in Q1 2020, and nearly the same as the peak of 7.96 years in Q4 2019.
The latest CoreLogic® Home Price Index (HPI) for the U.S. recorded an acceleration in annual price growth to 5.5% for July, about two percentage points faster than the prior July – despite much higher unemployment. The gain reflected rising demand and a supply shortage; Record low mortgage rates fueled homebuyer activity, especially for first-time buyers, and the health risks engendered by the pandemic persuaded many older home sellers to delay their listing to a later, healthier time.
As summer transitions to fall, we exit what is traditionally peak moving season. But of course, nothing about this season has been traditional -- from March through June of this year, our national rent index fell quickly during the months when rents generally rise fastest.
Downtown areas across the country are suffering the outsized impacts of both elevated apartment construction activity and economic damage from the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, apartment operators in the nation’s urban core submarkets have resorted to some of the most severe rent cuts in the nation.
Over the past six years there has been an explosion of institutional investment into student accommodation around the world on the premise that demand for housing is robust. That premise has been thrown into doubt as Covid-19 forces universities to reduce or cancel in-person teaching and thwarts travel by international college students.
U.S. commercial property prices posted a 1.6% year-over-year gain in August as declines in retail and office pricing weighed against continued growth in industrial and apartment prices, the latest RCA CPPI summary report shows. The US National All-Property Index was rising at close to a 6% rate at the start of 2020, before the Covid-19 crisis hit the economy.
Median home prices of single-family homes and condos in the third quarter of 2020 are less affordable than historical averages in 63 percent of counties with enough data to analyze, up from 54 percent a year ago.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, purchase-loan appraisals took a blow from disruptions inflicted upon homebuying and selling activities under nationwide lock-down and social distancing restrictions. After all, there is less demand for appraisal services by lenders when home sales are down. Now, with much of the country re-opening, the good news is that home sales have rebounded quickly.
The amount of equity in mortgaged real estate increased by $620 billion in the second quarter of 2020 from the second quarter of 2019, an annual increase of 6.6%, according to the latest CoreLogic Equity Report. Borrower equity hit a new high in the second quarter of 2020, and borrowers have gained over $6 trillion in equity in the last 10 years.
The widening pandemic led President Trump to declare a national emergency on March 13, sparking shelter-in-place directives across many communities. The shuttering of commercial establishments subsequently put many American workers out of work. As such, many homeowners affected by sudden job loss were ill prepared to maintain payments on their home mortgage loans.
53,621 single-family homes and condominiums in the United States were flipped in the second quarter. Those transactions represented 6.7 percent of all home sales in the second quarter of 2020, or one in 15 transactions. That figure was down from 7.5 percent of all home sales in the nation during the prior quarter, or one in 13, but up from 6.1 percent, or one in 17 sales, in the second quarter of last year.
Through what has been an unusual year, to say the least, the multifamily industry has in many ways been on the front lines of the disruption to lives and livelihoods. This impact has been borne out across multiple metrics, but nowhere so clearly as in multifamily demand. Through the first eight months of 2020 apartment demand fell by 42% compared to the same period last year – even as new deliveries were almost on par with last year’s volume.
U.S. Single-Family Rents Up 1.7% Year Over Year in July. Rent increases slowed across all price levels, though rents for lower-priced homes increased faster than those of higher-priced homes in July compared with a year earlier. Honolulu saw the largest decrease in rent prices, falling 1.3% from a year earlier.
New York’s luxury apartments were in great shape at the beginning of 2020, but occupancy has come down notably during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March and August, New York’s top-tier product recorded a 210-basis point decline in occupancy, one of the nation’s worst performances for that product niche.
U.S. sales involving large office buildings had been on the decline throughout the economic expansion. As more small buildings sell, other measures of market health such as the dollar volume of deal activity can reveal a different meaning. A $100 billion market where half of the volume was concentrated in the purchase of expensive office towers is qualitatively distinct from a more broad-based market driven by the sale of a multitude of small buildings.
U.S. properties with foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions — saw a slight uptick in August 2020 from July 2020, with 9,889 filings reported. That number increased monthly by 11 percent, but is still down 81 percent from last year.
New York faces an uphill battle to regain its footing in apartment fundamentals, and the Manhattan submarkets are disproportionately impacting the market’s poor results. New York has racked up several unwelcome titles since the start of the pandemic. The market has lost more jobs than any other market, shedding over 1 million positions in the year-ending July. Throughout the summer, rent collections have been among worst nationally.
There were a total of 9,889 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions — in August 2020, up 11 percent from a month ago but down 81 percent from a year ago. “While foreclosure activity remains over 80% below 2019 totals, there was a significant increase in foreclosure starts in August compared to July,” said Rick Sharga, Executive Vice President at RealtyTrac.
Widespread difficulty with housing costs has been a troubling constant. Despite a slight improvement in this month’s data, 29 percent of Americans failed to pay their rent or mortgage in full during the first week of September, and 8 percent had not completed their August payment by the end of the month.
