The Colorado Springs home rental market made for an interesting conversation with the property manager for our north office today. We have separate property managers for each office, and our north office is just restarting the program, but he manages about 150 units, including 75 single family homes at present, and so I thought he would be a good data point.
Lots of my prospective clients ask about rentals, in case they can't find the right house, or want to build, and so the topic is pretty current. I was very surpised when he told me he does not have a single vacancy at the moment, and that all of his rentals are gone within 2-3 weeks of getting them. He also indicated that rental prices and terms have firmed up considerably. 0% vacancy?!
Being the numbers guy that I am, I did a quick check of our MLS bulletin board of single family rentals, and found there were only 593 "For Rent" properties posted, with an average rent of just over $1300 per month. That is approximately 8.9% of the total active listing inventory. I thought I would check a couple of the more popular areas (Briargate and Northgate) just to see what the numbers looked like there. There were 81 single family properties, with an average rent of just over $1600/mo. This was 10.2% of the active listing inventory. In fairness, we have a lot of new construction available in those areas right now, so the ratios are probably a bit skewed, but that did not seem like very many to me. There were 42 properties reported as being leased during July in that area, compared with 315 for the whole area.
Of course the rental inventory is very different from the listing inventory, in that a much larger piece of it is not listed or managed by an agent, but is offered by the owner, but I thought it was an interesting thing that the ones our north office property manager had were all rented right now. Another sign the market is turning here?