This week, the National Multifamily Housing Council’s Rent Payment Tracker found that 76.4% of renter households had made a full or partial rent payment by Sept. 6, based on a survey of 11.4 million professionally managed market-rate apartment units.
This marks a 4.8 percentage point decrease from the share of households who paid rent through Sept. 6, 2019, equivalent to a difference of 552,796 households, and compares with the 79.3% of households that had made a payment by Aug. 6, 2020.
Notably, the expanded unemployment benefits thought to buoy collection rates throughout the COVID-19 pandemic were allowed to expire July 31. Within the past week, the CDC has also levied a nationwide moratorium on evictions for non-payment of rent.
“The initial rent payment figures from September have begun to demonstrate the increasing challenges apartment residents are facing. Falling rent payments mean that apartment owners and operators will increasingly have difficulty meeting their mortgages, paying their taxes and utilities, and meeting payroll,” says Doug Bibby, NMHC president. “The enactment of a nationwide eviction moratorium last week did nothing to help renters or alleviate the financial distress they are facing. Instead, it only is a stopgap measure that puts the entire housing finance system at jeopardy and saddles apartment residents with untenable levels of debt. Federal policymakers would have been better advised to continue to provide support as they successfully did through the CARES Act."
The NMHC and multifamily experts from its data partners—including Entrata, ResMan, Yardi, RealPage, and MRI Software—do believe that the Labor Day holiday could account for part of the a drop in collections for the start of September, as residents may not be able to access leasing offices over holidays.
Still, in the most recent NMHC Rent Payment Tracker webinar, these same experts emphasize the impact of the loss of benefits on the rental market—especially given the differences in collection rates by geographic area and building class.
“The holiday does make the numbers a little bit messy, but as we’re looking at data by metro, there’s a really direct correlation some missed or late payments and just how expensive a market is. The higher-priced metros have had much more of a deterioration in collections,” says Greg Willett, chief economist of RealPage. “That is telling us something, that it’s not just about the holiday, there’s a little bit more financial stress that’s starting to show up due to the lower unemployment benefits.”
