The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC)’s Rent Payment Tracker found 72.0 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by September 6 in its survey of 11.7 million units of professionally managed apartment units across the country.
This is a 4.4 percentage point decrease from the share who paid rent through September 6, 2020 and compares to 81.2 percent that had been paid by September 6, 2019. It should be noted that the holiday weekend and reporting issues relating to recent natural disasters may have impacted today’s data and therefore may not be a direct comparison to last year’s figures. This data encompasses a wide variety of market-rate rental properties across the United States, which can vary by size, type and average rental price.
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.
