Apartment Rent Payments at 90.3% as of November 20

The National Multifamily Housing Council reports that 90.3% of households living in the country’s stock of professionally managed market-rate apartment properties have paid rent for November as of the 20th.

The latest results are off by a mild 1.6 percentage points from the 91.9% share of households making payments through November 20, 2019.

The findings come from the National Multifamily Housing Council’s Rent Payment Tracker research, compiling information provided by five technology firms, including RealPage, Inc., for more than 11 million market-rate apartment units.

Once again, payments continue to track about where they have been throughout recent months. A jump in missed payments still could emerge, however, since some of those who are unemployed are meeting rent obligations with savings accrued when the CARES Act provided enhanced unemployment benefits. Those savings will be depleted over time.

Furthermore, federal emergency programs that provide assistance for gig workers – who are generally not covered by state-level unemployment plans – and for those who have exhausted their state-level benefits currently are set to run out of funding at the end of this calendar year.

Previous Patterns Hold in Property Class Payments

As has been seen since the COVID-19 pandemic began, rent collections remain better in the upper-end and mid-range apartments than in the lower-tier properties. RealPage stats show November payments through the 20th at 92.6% in the Class B block of product and 92.4% in the Class A inventory.

Collection levels are lower at 86.9% in Class C projects. Encouragingly, however, the gap between payments in Class C properties and those in Class A and B developments has closed to a more typical level in the past two weeks, after Class C collections trailed by a larger margin in the initial week of the month.

Some Metros Experience Collections Deterioration

While national apartment rent payment figures are solid at professionally managed projects, there’s meaningful year-over-year deterioration in collections in some local markets.

The share of households making timely rent payments is off by 6.8 percentage points in Portland and by 5.0 percentage points in Seattle.

Annual drops are at 4.7 percentage points in Las Vegas and San Jose, 3.8 percentage points in New York and 3.4 percentage points in Los Angeles.

The perhaps surprising result there is the magnitude of the decline in San Jose, as smaller losses of 1.1 to 1.4 percentage points are seen in San Francisco and Oakland.