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Among households in the United States, 68% are owned and 32% are rented, based on estimates from the American Community Survey in 2021. That breakdown isn’t uniform across the country though. In Maine, almost 80% of households are owned, whereas in California, less than 60% is owned. In Washington, D.C., it’s less than half. Here are the splits for each state.
Posted by in Data Underload, households, rent
It’s growing more common for landlords to use software to set the rental prices of their properties. This of course leads to software companies promising optimized pricing for maximum profit, which leads to higher rent for residents. Heather Vogell, Haru Coryne, and Ryan Little, for ProPublica, look closer at the practice, with a focus on pricing company RealPage:
To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm — a set of mathematical rules — to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge.
For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.
One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.
Oh.
Tags: algorithm, housing, ProPublica, rent
Posted by in algorithm, housing, ProPublica, rent, statistics
Rent increased pretty much everywhere in the United States over the past year. Abha Bhattarai, Chris Alcantara and Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post use a map to show you by how much:
Nationally, rents rose a record 11.3 percent last year, according to real estate research firm CoStar Group. That fast pace of growth remained elevated in the first months of 2022, as many parts of the country continued to notch double-digit jumps in rent prices.
Tags: rent, Washington Post
Posted by in maps, rent, Washington Post