Homes For Rent Lincoln Ca

Renters are next victims of the housing market

Stephan Metelica, a 24-year old charter pilot, shares a two-bedroom apartment with a friend in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The duo split the $1,525 monthly rent, but they were surprised this month when their landlord lease came up for renewal and their landlord asked for a 5 percent increase, to $1,600.

“I was pretty upset about it,” Metelica says of what would amount to nearly $40 more per month per person. “I thought a 5 percent increase was ridiculous.”

Renters, long happy to sidestep the drama homeowners have suffered in the roller-coaster housing market, are now facing their downside of the real estate market’s correction. With apartment and rental housing construction halved in recent years and a wave of former homeowners competing for apartment space with "echo boomers" and other renters, conditions have suddenly ripened for landlords to raise the rent.

Metelica persuaded his landlord to curb the increase, capping his new rent at $1,550. The roommates and landlord have a verbal agreement for that new rental rate, he says, with a new lease signing imminent. But his ability to talk his way out of a bigger rent increase makes him more of an exception than the rule this year, according to experts.

Last year the rental market quietly shifted from a tenants’ market to what is now decidedly a landlord’s market, said Chris Herbert, research director at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The supply of properties is tightening and vacancy rates are dropping, so landlords have been emboldened to raise the rent.

Nationally, rents are expected to rise 5 percent this year and another 5 percent in 2012, according to Greg Willett, vice president of research and analysis at MPF Research in Carrollton, Texas. The trend is not expected to moderate until 2013, when new multifamily housing construction adds to supply and the housing market stabilizes enough to attract new buyers.

“In California, landlords have to file a 60-day notice if they plan to raise rents by more than 10 percent,” Herbert says. “And in some markets, we’re once again seeing them issue those notices.”

Of course all rental markets are local, and the trend is more pronounced in the San Francisco Bay area, for example, than in Southern California where rents are little changed.

In its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report released last week, the Harvard center said rising rents and the rising cost of owning a home are forcing Americans across all income levels to pay a higher proportion of their income for housing. As of 2009, more than 19 million households paid more than half their incomes for housing, including more than 10 million renters, according to the study. Households in the $45,000 to $60,000 income range have faced a particularly sharp increase in the housing cost burden over the past decade.

149 Loveland Way Sacramento, CA 95838 – MLS# 11012837 | Bill Joyce ...

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