Ranks Of Tenants Keep Swelling Due To Foreclosures

May 20th, 2008

The massive number of foreclosures has indeed helped tenants to take their numbers higher and higher still. A study released on Wednesday, by the Harvard University’s Joint Center of Housing Studies, sets these facts to becoming the general order of the day. The study shows that U.S. renters have in fact increased by a massive one million during the past one year. This growth has taken place by four times the number from 2003 to 2006, taking the current figure to 35.1 million people! There has been a massive demand for rental properties as well recently.

As prices rise, the competition gets higher and cruder. The rent rates have skyrocketed to a record $775 per month on average. Only about a one-third of the rental properties are single-family households. While the rest of the buildings are apartments, it is hard for foreclosed homeowners to find an appropriate and affordable home in the right kind of price range. According to the center’s senior scholar, William Apgar, this tends to be a major problem.

Even though hundreds of thousands of rental properties have come up to the surface in the form of houses and condos, many have gone back to the hands of the bank that had lent money on them. Very few of these properties were being offered to tenants as the lenders would not want their properties to be under the hands of the bank, or in the property management business either. So, many of these properties lay vacant too! The owner of WestsideRentals.com, Mark Verge, has reported that they get over 7,000 to 8,000 inquiries a month from prospective buyers. The Santa Monica based company states that this is 15% higher compared to what was on last year. Mostly the enquiries are made by people undergoing foreclosures or having faced foreclosure of their property already, and seeking immediate rented places.

The problem is in fact expected to keep getting worse with the fillings being reported to be on 649,917 properties in the first quarter of 2008 itself. About 23% of this only seems to have been taken from the previous quarter, and 116% from a year earlier! All this data suggest that more and more filings are on the rise during the rest of the year. According to RealtyTrac, an online market place for foreclosed properties, this is the grim situation that is leading to greater crisis, and not helping families fresh out of foreclosures to get immediate rented homes.