November 29, 2003
WHERE THE PRICES ARE LOW...LOW...LOW...:
Apartment Glut Forces Owners to Cut Rents in Much of U.S. (DAVID LEONHARDT, 11/29/03, NY Times)
Renting an apartment in much of the country these days can feel a little like waking up on your birthday.Waiting for the tenants in some building lobbies around Memphis every morning are free cups of Starbucks coffee. In the Atlanta suburbs, people who move into one garden-style apartment building receive $500 gift certificates to Best Buy, the electronics chain. In Cleveland, Denver and many other cities, landlords have been giving new tenants gifts worth $1,000 or more: one, two or even three months of rent-free living.
While rents have continued to rise in many big cities on the coasts, including New York and Los Angeles, they are falling in more than 80 percent of metropolitan areas across the country. Low interest rates in recent years have persuaded many families to move out of rented apartments and buy their first homes at the same time that developers have been putting up thousands of new rental buildings, leaving many landlords desperate to fill apartments.
The portion of apartments sitting vacant this summer rose to 9.9 percent, the highest level since the Census Bureau began keeping statistics in 1956.
"I've been doing this for 30 years, and this is the worst rental climate I've ever seen," said Leonard Richman, president of the Sunshine Corporation, which manages almost 4,000 apartments in Memphis. "Rents have gone down to where they were about three or four years ago."
Remind us again where inflationary pressures are going to come from? Posted by Orrin Judd at November 29, 2003 10:20 AM
College, medical treatment, transportation, electric power generation, restaurant food, wine . . .
Oh, yeah. Housing. The average price of a house in my county is $560,000.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 29, 2003 3:26 PMYou live in Hawaii, right, Harry? Sheesh, costs a fortune just to get there!!
I've got a friend trying to rent a nice, 1950's two-bedroom house in Atlanta, barely a mile from Emory University, for $1000 a mo. & she can't get it.
Posted by: at November 29, 2003 7:12 PMNow, FAST food has not gone up much at all over the years (especially Taco Bell).
Posted by: jm hamlen at November 29, 2003 11:00 PMwage growth.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at November 30, 2003 12:12 AMI hope that trend doesn't reach here.. losing rent on the other side of my duplex could eat up all my interest savings from refinancing.
Posted by: MarkD at November 30, 2003 1:20 PMI wish those empty apartment buildings were mobile so that those landlords could jack some of them up on trailers and ship them to the D.C. area. There's still a severe housing crunch here, though there's been a lot of new construction; however, the road/transportation crunch is far, far worse. Washington has a hopelessly inadequate road network for the amount of traffic it carries.
Posted by: Joe at November 30, 2003 5:19 PMI dunno about Joe, by my younger daughter and her husband just moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington and they're having some difficulty finding housing, even though their income would easily rent a place here in Hawaii.
They're there because the Navy assigned him to Ft. George Meade.
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Posted by: discount phentermine at June 11, 2004 5:14 PMcould someone out there please shed some light on how much to rent a place in hawaii is and where the best places to move to. thanks
could someone out there please shed some light on how much to rent a place in hawaii is and where the best places to move to. thanks