Dennis Norman
By: Dennis Norman
Over the past two years home prices have dropped throughout the country, rather significantly in some areas. Falling prices have created opportunities for investors but have also created a challenge for landlords and property managers to keep up with changing rental markets. Logic would dictate that if home prices in any given market have declined 20 or 30 percent over a year or two that most likely rental rates have decreased as well to some extent.
Granted, there is more demand for rentals as many homeowners are forced to rent after losing their homes in foreclosure, but there has also been a large influx of inventory into the rental pool; new homes builders couldn’t sell and chose to rent, foreclosures being bought up by investors to rent until the market comes back, etc.
Today I found a website that is a great FREE resource and can help you determine rental values for a market. The site, RentBits.com , has collected data from over 7,000,000 rental properties to come up with historical rental rates and for current rates has collected data from over 500,000 active rentals.
While checking out their site I counted 38 states that they have data for one or more markets in. I clicked on Miami to check it out. Once you select an area you call put data for houses, apartments or “other” (I know, what is other? I had the same question, asked the owner of the site and he told me it is condos, town-homes and duplexes). You then see a graph showing rental rates for the 5 proceeding months and a box below showing current rental rates (median and average) as well as the number of units available. In talking with the owner I understand they have the data for a year back now and are working to implement that into the site. Below is a screen shot of the graph and data I saw on the site.
While conversing back and forth with the RentBits.com owner I discovered he has a couple additional useful sites as well; RentMarketer.Com and ApartmentMarketer.com. Both of these sites offer you the opportunity to have your rentals distributed to over 100 popular rental sites easily. This one is not free, but the prices seem very reasonable starting at $39.95 per month with not contract or obligation. I checked it out, watched the video and was pretty impressed…I’m going to try it.
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