QUESTION
What insight does the Department of Finance have on vacancy rates?
5:29:54
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89 sec
The Department of Finance reports a significant fall in vacancy rates this year, contributing to rising rents and supporting incomes.
- Vacancy rates are falling dramatically, with measurements slightly different from the Housing Vacancy Survey (HVS) but showing a sharp decline.
- This decrease in vacancy rates is driving rent increases, which supports incomes despite rising expenses.
- Significant value increases are observed in the unregulated sector of the housing market.
- The low vacancy rate indicates a supply-demand mismatch, addressed by the mayor's City of YES plan aiming to increase housing supply.
Justin L. Brannan
5:29:54
Recently, HPD put out its findings from the 2023 housing vacancy survey, obviously, the headline was about the city's vacancy rate falling to well, the city's the city's rental stock fell to 1.4%.
5:30:13
I know as part of your assessment, you collect information on rental buildings with 11 or more units.
5:30:21
So is there any insight that DoF might have into these vacancy rates?
Preston Niblack
5:30:26
Yes.
5:30:27
I mean, we certainly have seen vacancy rates start to fall again quite dramatically this year.
5:30:34
And slightly different measurements, so it's not quite the same numbers as what we saw from the HVS.
5:30:43
Not quite the same time period, but definitely definitely a sharp downward decline in vacancy rates.
5:30:48
And that's also been driving the increase in rents that we've seen that supported incomes, even though expenses have been rising incomes have been rising fairly substantially too.
5:30:58
Particularly in the unregulated sector of the market, we saw some pretty hefty increases in values this year.
5:31:05
Ultimately, that low vacancy rate reflects the mismatch between supply and demand that the mayor is proposing to address through his City of YES plan to help increase the supply of housing and ease those historically low vacancy rates.