Late February Apartment Rent Payments Slip Moderately
RealPage apartment rent payment stats for February through the 27th – essentially the whole month – show collections in professionally managed market-rate apartment properties off 2.4 percentage points from year-earlier levels.
February’s moderate year-over-year deterioration in payments essentially mirrors the results from January as well as late 2020.
The National Multifamily Housing Council is not publishing data from the organization’s Rent Payment Tracker research this week. That Rent Payment Tracker research covers a larger set of properties, relying on info from not just RealPage but also another four property management software providers.
The next round of information on payments from the NMHC will be available on March 9.
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 payments for February through the 27th at 92.5% in the Class B block of product and 92.3% in the Class A inventory.
Collection levels are lower at 86.2% in Class C projects, where more households live paycheck to paycheck.
The List of Payment Laggards Largely Holds
The biggest collections shortfalls relative to levels for February 2020 through the 27th are in Portland, down 8.4 percentage points, and Seattle, down 7.2 percentage points.
Annual declines come in at 6.6 percentage points in San Jose and around 5 percentage points across New Orleans (5.4 points), Las Vegas (5.4 points), Riverside/San Bernardino (4.7 points) and Charlotte (4.6 points).
In Los Angeles, usually one of the weaker performers for collections, payments are down 3.9 percentage points. New York payments are much better than they have been in recent months, with the year-over-year decline held to 1.3 points.
The bad weather seen in Texas during the third week of February appeared to push missed payments a tiny bit higher in Austin, San Antonio and Houston, but the numbers didn’t slip relative to January results in Dallas and Fort Worth.
