Following a trend of dropping apartment vacancies in the Denver metro area, single-family home vacancies are at their lowest point since officials began tracking it in 2001.
Vacancies in rental condos, single family homes and other small properties fell 63% in the fourth quarter of 2010, falling to a new low of 2.0%. The vacancy rate for single-family homes is generally lower than the multi-family, apartment vacancy rate.
“Nevertheless, the multi-family number at 5.5%, this number at 2%, it just shows that overall rental housing in the Denver metro area is in a pretty tight situation right now,” says Colorado Division of Housing Spokesman Ryan McMaken.
The vacancy rate would be even lower, if not for the influx of new rental homes constantly coming onto the market.
“Homes that people are renting because they can’t sell the property for as much as they need to or they’re foreclosed properties. So that is actually providing an outlet to renters in the sense that even though vacancies are very low, renters know that these sorts of properties are coming online all the time due to foreclosures,” says McMaken.
That, says McMaken, is also keeping rents from going up. Median rents in the fourth quarter were largely flat throughout the metro area. The lowest vacancy rates were found in Douglas County, which was at 0.9%, and there were no vacancies among the units surveyed in the Boulder/Broomfield area in the fourth quarter.