The Census Bureau’s quarterly report on home ownership and occupancy for Q3 2024 stated that the rental housing vacancy rate was 6.9 percent. This was up 0.3 percentage points since last quarter’s report despite a sharp rise in the number of renter households.
Looking at vacancies
The headline vacancy rate reported by Census is for all rental housing in the country, both single-family and multifamily. Census breaks down this figure in various ways, including by the number of units in the building. The chart, below, illustrates this comparison.
The chart shows that the vacancy rate for multifamily housing with 5 or more units per property as measured by the Census Bureau rose 0.2 percentage points to 8.0 percent in Q3. The single-family rental vacancy rose 0.6 percentage points to 6.0 percent.
Note that Apartment List reported that the multifamily rental vacancy rate at the end of September was 6.7 percent. By contrast, Yardi Matrix reported the multifamily rental vacancy rate in September as 6.2 percent. While the Census Bureau attempts to capture data representing all rental housing in the country, other data sources may focus on subsets of the market like professionally managed properties and so they come up with different results.
The Census Bureau reported that the rental vacancy rate in the core cities of the Census Bureau’s Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) was 7.2 percent in Q3 2024, up from 6.9 percent reported for the previous quarter. The rental vacancy rate in the suburbs of the MSAs was 6.7 percent in Q3 2024, up 0.2 percentage points for the quarter. These trends are shown in the next chart, below.
The rental vacancy rate history for each of the Census regions is shown in the next chart, below. The reported vacancy rates fell 0.3 percentage points in the Northeast, the only region to see a decline. The vacancy rate was reported to jump 1.4 percentage points to 6.9 percent in the Midwest. However, the Q2 figure of 5.5 percent seems anomalously low since no other reading since Q3 2022 has been below 6.8 percent. The reported vacancy rate rose 0.1 percentage point in the South and 0.2 percentage points in the West. By the numbers, the vacancy rates were reported to be 5.4 percent in the Northeast, 6.9 percent in the Midwest, 8.5 percent in the South and 5.7 percent in the West.
Census reported that 61.9 percent of vacant rental units were in structures with 2 or more units. About 25.6 percent of the vacant rental units had 3 or more bedrooms, with 1 bedroom units comprising 34.0 percent and 2 bedroom units comprising 38.2 percent of vacant stock. The median unit vacancy duration for rental properties in Q3 2024 was 2.7 months, up from 2.5 months one year earlier.
Rentership rate unchanged in Q3
The Census Bureau reported that 34.4 percent of the country’s 132,114,000 occupied housing units were inhabited by renter households in Q3 2024. This rate is unchanged from that in Q2.
The history of the number of occupied housing units and the share of renter households since 2012 is shown in the next chart, below. The chart shows that the reported number of renter households rose by 339,000 in the quarter and by half a million since Q4 2023. The 45,494,000 renter households identified in Q3 2024 set a new all-time high for the sixth quarter in a row.
The number of homeowning households rose by 361,000 in the quarter to 86,620,000 households. This was also a new all-time high. Despite representing 65.6 percent of all households, homeowning households represented only 51.6 percent of the growth in occupied housing units.
The Census Bureau also reported on the rentership rate by the age of the head of household. The results are illustrated in the next chart.
Census reports higher rent growth
The Census Bureau also tracks the median asking rents for the country as-a-whole. The history of their findings along with the year-over-year rent growth rate is shown in the next chart, below.
Census reported that monthly rents rose $42 per month in Q3 2024 to another new all-time high. Census reported the national median rent to be $1,523 per month, a gain of 2.8 percent from the prior quarter and 4.2 percent year-over-year.
By contrast, Yardi Matrix reported that the national average apartment rent in September was $1,750 per month. Apartment List reported the national average apartment rent in September was $1,405 per month.
The last chart, below, shows the history of the median rent by Census region as a percentage of the national median rent. Rents were 9.3 percent higher than the national median in the Northeast, and 27.0 percent higher in the West. Rents were reported to be 22.4 percent lower than the national median in the Midwest and 2.0 percent lower in the South.
The Census report is called Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, Third Quarter 2024. It is available here.
