The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC)’s Rent Payment Tracker found 90.1 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by September 20 in its survey of 11.4 million units of professionally managed apartment units across the country.
This is a 1.7-percentage point, or 192,936-household decrease from the share who paid rent through September 20, 2019 and compares to 90.0 percent that had paid by August 20, 2020. These data encompass a wide variety of market-rate rental properties across the United States, which can vary by size, type and average rental price.
“This morning’s results show the real-world impact of lawmakers failing in their responsibilities to their constituents,” said Doug Bibby, NMHC President. “Almost 200,000 households have been unable to pay their September rent. Congress and the Trump administration have a proven model in the CARES Act that supported apartment residents through the early months of the pandemic. Now is the time for them to show leadership by once again supporting the millions of Americans who call an apartment home by enacting meaningful rental assistance and mitigating, to some degree, the negative consequences of the nationwide eviction moratorium which jeopardizes the stability of the nation’s housing finance system.”
The NMHC Rent Payment Tracker metric provides insight into changes in resident rent payment behavior over the course of each month, and, as the dataset ages, between months. While the tracker is intended to serve as an indicator of resident financial challenges, it is also intended to track the recovery as well, including the effectiveness of government stimulus and subsidies.
However, noteworthy technical issues may make historical comparisons imprecise. For example, factors such as varying days of the week on which data are collected; individual companies’ differing payment collection policies; shelter-in-place orders’ effects on residents’ ability to deliver payments in person or by mail; the closure of leasing offices, which may delay operators’ payment processing; and other factors can affect how and when rent data is processed and recorded.
Find more information, including the methodology, on the NMHC Rent Payment Tracker here.
The NMHC Rent Payment Tracker FAQ can be found here.
