Just a Landlord

An important piece from DSnews

In an opinion piece published on the Informed Comment website, John Buell, a former professor at the College of the Atlantic, observed that an after-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic trauma will weigh on the housing market as homeowners and renters struggle to keep up with housing costs.

“If foreclosures and evictions are standing in the way of recovery, it is also safe to say that the draconian cuts in budgets of state and local governments translate into wage reductions and/or unemployment for public sector workers and thus more pressures on the housing market,” Buell wrote. “If homeowners and government workers are not able to create sufficient demand to restore economic growth the federal government must step in. State governments are constitutionally prohibited from borrowing for daily expenses.”

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties-and-is-it-changing

Institutional investors own a growing share of the nation’s 22.5 million rental properties and a majority of the 47.5 million units contained in those properties, according to the US Census Bureau’s recently released 2015 Rental Housing Finance Survey (RHFS). The changes are notable because virtually all of the household growth since the financial crisis has occurred in rental units, with more than half of the growth occurring in single-family rental units.

According to the RHFS, individual investors were the biggest group in the rental housing market in 2015, accounting for 74.4 percent, or 16.7 million rental properties, followed by limited liability partnerships (LLPs), limited partnerships (LPs), or limited liability companies (LLCs) (14.8 percent); trustees for estates (4.1 percent); and nonprofit organizations (1.6 percent) (Table 1). However, because the share of rental properties owned by individual investors tends to decrease with the property size, individual investors owned less than half (47.8 percent) of rental units, followed by LLPs, LPs, or LLCs (33.2 percent), trustees for estates (3.3 percent), real estate corporations (3.3 percent), and nonprofit organizations (3.2 percent).

A 2017 report puts 55% of rental units as owned by part time landlords
https://www.avail.co/education/articles/state-independent-landlords-2017

https://www.globest.com/2020/07/30/small-apartment-landlords-worry-about-payments-as-pandemic-continues/

Small “mom and pop” landlords, often defined as landlords who own or manager fewer than 20 units, reported lower rent collections in 2020, with 25 percent of them borrowing money to cover operating costs, according to a survey by The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals and UC Berkley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

In the survey, about 58 percent owned or managed 1-4 units, and 25 percent owned or managed 5 to 19 units. The majority of respondents were in California, Texas and Illinois. About 67 percent of these landlords perceived their rental properties as a source of retirement income.