Housing crash sparks growth in rent houses

RentCafe.com has summed up something that isn’t a huge surprise, but it gives some numbers to what lots of us have been able to tell by looking around our neighborhoods the past 10 years or so.

There are a lot more rent houses around here than there used to be, according to the internet apartment listing service based in Santa Barbara, California.

Oklahoma City has the largest percentage of single-family rentals than any other big city; rent houses make up 48 percent of all rental housing here, the company said.

Thank you, low-ballers, flippers and out-of-state investors with out-of-state dollars — meaning great house-buying power — who came in to clean up after the national housing crash (just a hard slump here) a decade ago and since.

That’s not RentCafe.com’s characterization exactly, but mine, from following the market into, through and out of the Great Recession.

No complaints here; they helped keep the housing stock in better shape than it might have been without them.

But the opportunity to buy low also turned lots of our neighbors into housing investors, too. And the numbers there, actually, are something of a surprise.

No complaints here, as long as they keep up appearances. RentCafe.com put it like this: “The main trigger for this wave of single-family homes turning into rental homes was the housing crash of the late 2000s. Many single-family homes with ‘underwater’ mortgages were swept up by a few institutional investors during the crisis and turned into rentals. However, a much larger number of small investors became landlords during that period of time.”

RentCafe.com cited a recent Urban Institute study showing that individual investors own most single-family rentals in the U.S.:

“Of the 15-plus-million single-family rentals currently on the market, only 2 percent are owned by large investment firms, and about 45 percent belong to landlords who own just one unit.”

There’s a lot more apartment complexes around here than there used to be, too. They get more attention than the less splashy trade and construction of houses for rent.

But rent houses have outpaced apartments as a percentage of the increasing rental housing stock.

Between 2007 and 2016, according to RentCafe.com, the number of single-family homes for rent here increased 30 percent, or 9,900 houses; and the number of apartments increased 7 percent, or 3,400 multifamily units.

Somewhat eyebrow raising. Not a huge surprise, considering the generational emotional impact of the housing crash, the wreckage it left, and millennials’ subsequent reluctance to buy homes.

For more national details and analysis, go to RentCafe.com/blog/ and click on, or search for “SingleFamily Rentals Increased Faster than Apartments in 22 of 30 Big Cities, Led by Phoenix.”