June 26, 2006

Santa Clarita Rental Market Getting Tighter

Increase in home prices and interest rates makes it harder to buy a home in Santa Clarita.

With Santa Clarita real estate prices remaining at high levels and interest rates rising, it's becoming harder and harder for potential home buyers to find a home that they can afford. This is also making it harder to find a place to rent, with vacancy rates declining from already low levels as potential home buyers are opting to rent instead.

According to Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate, Los Angeles County has a 2.8% vacancy rate, down from 3.2% a year ago. The competition for rentals has allowed landlords to raise rents by 7% on average throughout the county. Rents in Hollywood went up 9%.

Santa Clarita single family rental homes are seeing multiple applications for tenants, giving the owners the ability to pick and choose their tenants.

Adding to the rental shortage, many Santa Clarita investors either sold their single family homes, condos and townhomes within the last year or converted apartment buildings into condominiums, and that also reduced the rental supply.

Lisa Trosien, who operates ApartmentExpert.com, says that some of the apartment units could return to the rental market when individual owners rent out units instead of reselling them, as they might have originally intended when the market was hot. This is creating what she calls a "ghost market": rental units that aren't counted in traditional apartment inventory. This is certainly what is expected for some of the units in The Madison, the converted condos that used to be The Prado apartments in Valencia at Town Center Drive.


	Renters Face Tight Apartment Market
	Easing real-estate market, condo conversions crimp apartment stock
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