Pub. 4 2019 Issue 2

18 www.ctaahq.org Who Are Today’s Renters? By Kim O’Brien, RealPage A downtown-dwelling, 20-something with no spouse, no kids and a job in a high-paying profession: This profile should sound familiar if you’ve seen any news coverage of the apartment market in recent years. It’s the person most often described as being today’s apartment renter. And to the casual industry observer, it might seem that’s the only type of renter in today’s market. In discussions about the nation’s apartment market, rental housing residents often are lumped into one large group. But the reality is far more nuanced. To provide a more in-depth look at the apartment renter base, RealPage recently examined 5.7 million individual lease transactions in a statistical analysis of actual renter characteristics such as age, income, number of adults per household, marital status and the presence of children or pets in the unit. Based on this analysis, eight distinct types of U.S. renter households emerged, as discussed in the Oct. 2nd RealPage Asset Optimization webcast. Further, some types of households are more prevalent in certain local markets and in certain product types than others. To identify these various local trends, 25 large metros and 25 smaller markets across the country were studied. Starting-Out Singles The biggest group identified, the “Starting-Out Singles” cluster, made up 29 percent of the renter base examined. On average, these were the youngest renters profiled, at 26 years old. With limited incomes and high rent-to- income ratios, the Starting Out Singles move around quite a bit, choosing smaller apartments in Class B and C properties, usually in the suburbs. Only a small slice of this group gravitates toward Class C units in the urban core. Big metros heavy in Starting Out