Apartment Rent Payments at a Three-Year Low from April Through September

For an industry focused on the end of the Biden administration eviction moratorium as well as federal unemployment support, apparent negative news about rent payments must jostle. Data from the National Multifamily Housing Council that showed the lowest April-to-September percentage of rent payments made since at least 2019 has to catch the eye in that context.

Early September saw only 72% of rent payments, down from 80.2% in August and 76.5% in July. The next lowest was September of 2020, which was 76.4%. Compare that to a high of 82.9% in April 2019.

The data covers roughly 11 million units and comes from five key property management software companies.

But numbers can be deceiving, especially at the beginning of a month, says Chris Bruen, NMHC senior director of research. Combine that with Labor Day and Hurricane Ida, and the anomaly could be just that—a twist of timing and circumstances.

“You’ll see that the payment figures that come in the first week of the month tend to be much more volatile,” Bruen tells GlobeSt.com. “Sometimes it will be an unusually low figure in the first week and by the end of month it won’t be as much off.”

The bigger issue, though, was timing. A holiday weekend at the beginning of the month can have an impact. “It could be whether or not the office is open or if people have plans and might be out of town,” he says. “It could be a number of factors. But we’ve seen that correlation between holiday weekends and the percentage of payments that are made.”

A more important factor was likely the weather. “The September hurricane Ida had an effect here,” Bruen continues. “I would say this month the hurricane is the primary factor here.”

One of the property management software companies, RealPage, looked at some metro regions heavily hit. New Orleans had an early September 2020 payment rate of 80.9%. This month, it hit 33.0%. New York, which was at 70.3% last year at this time, dropped to 39.1%.

Tracking the hurricane’s path, RealPage found that payments were 7 to 12 percentage points below last year.

Bruen cautions the industry to wait for figures at month’s end. As an example, the 80.2% at the beginning of August 2021 became 93.7% by the end.

“A more positive side, we’ve seen some really strong rent growth figures,” Bruen adds, pointing to data suggesting between 3.4% and 4% annual growth over the last two years.