If you think my apartment is bad....
I'll tell you I am lucky. I read this in the newspaper the other day and was shocked to realize how lucky I am to have an apartment. It's insane right now:
Surging rents, low vacancies create ripple effects in valley
By MIKE WIGGINS The Daily Sentinel
Friday, August 24, 2007
Tara Arterburn had read and heard the stories about the Grand Valley’s tight rental housing market.
It wasn’t until she began thumbing through the phone book and classified ads in search of her own place, however, that she discovered just how limited her options are.
Arterburn has walked through two apartments, only to find competition from several fellow prospective tenants filling out applications. She has called and been turned away by numerous apartment managers who either have nothing available or aren’t willing to rent to college students.
Three weeks after returning to Grand Junction from a summer of studying and traveling in Europe, the Mesa State College senior remains without a lease. Her frustration at the dead ends climbed to the point that she briefly stopped scrounging around, leaving her belongings in storage.
“I didn’t realize just how hard it was,” the 21-year-old said. “I had no idea I would have this much trouble.”
Mesa State students who began classes last week and thousands of others looking for an apartment find themselves in the same predicament.
Well-paid energy and construction workers have led the way in snapping up nearly every apartment, townhome and condominium in Mesa County, creating a crunchhousing industry observers say has hit in the last 12 to 18 months. Rents are higher, and vacancy rates are lower than they have been in at least a decade.
A recent study concluded roughly three times the number of apartments that have been built, on average, each year in the last several years are needed to satisfy the valley’s appetite for rental housing. Housing industry officials say the county’s newest apartment complex - one that contains more than a handful of units - was built 11 years ago.
The widening gap between the short supply and the large demand has generated concerns - but few solutions - among developers, planners and property managers.
“We’re so afraid this market will get away from us just like it has in the Rural Resort Region,” said Kathi Williams, the executive director of the Colorado Division of Housing. The Rural Resort Region was formed by Eagle, Garfield, Lake, Pitkin and Summit counties in the mid-1990s to address a variety of issues facing resort communities, including housing. “If we think the gap is large today, we only fear it will get larger to the point that we can never afford it.”
‘THEY’LL DO ANYTHING TO GET IN’
When it comes to the rental market in Colorado, Grand Junction is bucking the trends.
The city’s apartment vacancy rate sunk to 1.5 percent in the first three months of 2007 - half of what it was for the same time period in 2006 and the lowest since a 2.9 percent rate was reported in spring 1997, Division of Housing data show. Similarly sized or larger cities on the Front Range reported vacancy rates ranging from 7 to 13 percent during the first quarter of this year.
The median rent in Grand Junction rose from $523.89 in the first quarter of 2006 to $571.86 this year. The 9.2 percent increase was the third-highest among 21 communities that participated in the Division of Housing survey, with only Steamboat Springs (13.7 percent) and Buena Vista (13.3 percent) reporting greater increases. The median rent in 10 communities, including Colorado Springs, Greeley and Montrose, declined.
Clare Britton, property manager at Foresight Village apartments on 25 1/2 Road, has as good a vantage point as anyone of the valley’s rental housing shortage. In her year and a half of managing the 182-unit complex, she said, no apartment has remained vacant beyond the month in which a tenant moved out.
Some days, Britton said, she fields dozens of phone calls and encounters a line of people waiting outside the management office before it opens at 8 a.m. When two apartments became available earlier this month, the first person showed up at the office at 5 a.m. A couple arrived next at 6 a.m. Several others made a loop in their vehicles around the parking lot and left without getting out.
“I feel like I’m selling Harry Potter books,” Britton said.
She said Foresight Village has stopped preapproving potential tenants and placing them on waiting lists. She now refuses to take an application until an apartment is available and requires applicants to do a walk-through before renting.
The reactions of applicants who have been turned away have ranged from tears to desperation.
“I’ve had people begging for an apartment, saying they’ll clean the apartment themselves,” Britton said. “They’ll do anything to get in.”
That sort of demand has permitted property managers to be more judicious about the tenants they select.
“Our market for years was that we kind of looked the other way sometimes” on tenants who had poor credit or an acrimonious history with prior landlords, said Terry Wakefield, who manages about 400 rentals as the owner of Wakefield Property Management. “We’ve tightened our standards. We do look at credit issues. We do look at someone’s job and income.”
Arterburn said one apartment manager asked for her credit card and bank account numbers. She said she got so tired of hearing others reject her because she was a college student that she took a day or two off from searching.
“There is so much competition that they can be selective,” she said. “It always seems they have a pool of applicants they can just pick from.”
Every one of Mesa State’s 1,181 on-campus beds is filled, including a 288-bed dormitory that opened a year ago. Roughly 40 additional students who were shut out of living on campus are bunking for the foreseeable future at the Residence Inn by Marriott on Horizon Drive.
Cindy Hoppe, a property manager with Bray & Co. in Grand Junction, said higher rents are creating more crowded households. Separate families are joining together to rent a house, and two roommates are looking for a third to defray costs, she said.
College students and middle-income residents are not the only ones scrambling or coming up empty.
The Grand Junction Housing Authority, which offers subsidized housing to roughly 1,300 low-income families, has another 1,300 sitting on a waiting list, Housing Authority Executive Director Jody Kole said. The Housing Authority has issued housing vouchers to 40 families who have not used them because they cannot find a place to live. A disabled woman who received a voucher in January is still without her own home.
“Folks are really, really struggling,” Kole said.
--From the Daily Sentinel: http://www.gjsentinel.com/search/content/news/stories/2007/08/24/8_26_www_no_vacancy_WWW.html
It's just a bit amazing I think.
Surging rents, low vacancies create ripple effects in valley
By MIKE WIGGINS The Daily Sentinel
Friday, August 24, 2007
Tara Arterburn had read and heard the stories about the Grand Valley’s tight rental housing market.
It wasn’t until she began thumbing through the phone book and classified ads in search of her own place, however, that she discovered just how limited her options are.
Arterburn has walked through two apartments, only to find competition from several fellow prospective tenants filling out applications. She has called and been turned away by numerous apartment managers who either have nothing available or aren’t willing to rent to college students.
Three weeks after returning to Grand Junction from a summer of studying and traveling in Europe, the Mesa State College senior remains without a lease. Her frustration at the dead ends climbed to the point that she briefly stopped scrounging around, leaving her belongings in storage.
“I didn’t realize just how hard it was,” the 21-year-old said. “I had no idea I would have this much trouble.”
Mesa State students who began classes last week and thousands of others looking for an apartment find themselves in the same predicament.
Well-paid energy and construction workers have led the way in snapping up nearly every apartment, townhome and condominium in Mesa County, creating a crunchhousing industry observers say has hit in the last 12 to 18 months. Rents are higher, and vacancy rates are lower than they have been in at least a decade.
A recent study concluded roughly three times the number of apartments that have been built, on average, each year in the last several years are needed to satisfy the valley’s appetite for rental housing. Housing industry officials say the county’s newest apartment complex - one that contains more than a handful of units - was built 11 years ago.
The widening gap between the short supply and the large demand has generated concerns - but few solutions - among developers, planners and property managers.
“We’re so afraid this market will get away from us just like it has in the Rural Resort Region,” said Kathi Williams, the executive director of the Colorado Division of Housing. The Rural Resort Region was formed by Eagle, Garfield, Lake, Pitkin and Summit counties in the mid-1990s to address a variety of issues facing resort communities, including housing. “If we think the gap is large today, we only fear it will get larger to the point that we can never afford it.”
‘THEY’LL DO ANYTHING TO GET IN’
When it comes to the rental market in Colorado, Grand Junction is bucking the trends.
The city’s apartment vacancy rate sunk to 1.5 percent in the first three months of 2007 - half of what it was for the same time period in 2006 and the lowest since a 2.9 percent rate was reported in spring 1997, Division of Housing data show. Similarly sized or larger cities on the Front Range reported vacancy rates ranging from 7 to 13 percent during the first quarter of this year.
The median rent in Grand Junction rose from $523.89 in the first quarter of 2006 to $571.86 this year. The 9.2 percent increase was the third-highest among 21 communities that participated in the Division of Housing survey, with only Steamboat Springs (13.7 percent) and Buena Vista (13.3 percent) reporting greater increases. The median rent in 10 communities, including Colorado Springs, Greeley and Montrose, declined.
Clare Britton, property manager at Foresight Village apartments on 25 1/2 Road, has as good a vantage point as anyone of the valley’s rental housing shortage. In her year and a half of managing the 182-unit complex, she said, no apartment has remained vacant beyond the month in which a tenant moved out.
Some days, Britton said, she fields dozens of phone calls and encounters a line of people waiting outside the management office before it opens at 8 a.m. When two apartments became available earlier this month, the first person showed up at the office at 5 a.m. A couple arrived next at 6 a.m. Several others made a loop in their vehicles around the parking lot and left without getting out.
“I feel like I’m selling Harry Potter books,” Britton said.
She said Foresight Village has stopped preapproving potential tenants and placing them on waiting lists. She now refuses to take an application until an apartment is available and requires applicants to do a walk-through before renting.
The reactions of applicants who have been turned away have ranged from tears to desperation.
“I’ve had people begging for an apartment, saying they’ll clean the apartment themselves,” Britton said. “They’ll do anything to get in.”
That sort of demand has permitted property managers to be more judicious about the tenants they select.
“Our market for years was that we kind of looked the other way sometimes” on tenants who had poor credit or an acrimonious history with prior landlords, said Terry Wakefield, who manages about 400 rentals as the owner of Wakefield Property Management. “We’ve tightened our standards. We do look at credit issues. We do look at someone’s job and income.”
Arterburn said one apartment manager asked for her credit card and bank account numbers. She said she got so tired of hearing others reject her because she was a college student that she took a day or two off from searching.
“There is so much competition that they can be selective,” she said. “It always seems they have a pool of applicants they can just pick from.”
Every one of Mesa State’s 1,181 on-campus beds is filled, including a 288-bed dormitory that opened a year ago. Roughly 40 additional students who were shut out of living on campus are bunking for the foreseeable future at the Residence Inn by Marriott on Horizon Drive.
Cindy Hoppe, a property manager with Bray & Co. in Grand Junction, said higher rents are creating more crowded households. Separate families are joining together to rent a house, and two roommates are looking for a third to defray costs, she said.
College students and middle-income residents are not the only ones scrambling or coming up empty.
The Grand Junction Housing Authority, which offers subsidized housing to roughly 1,300 low-income families, has another 1,300 sitting on a waiting list, Housing Authority Executive Director Jody Kole said. The Housing Authority has issued housing vouchers to 40 families who have not used them because they cannot find a place to live. A disabled woman who received a voucher in January is still without her own home.
“Folks are really, really struggling,” Kole said.
--From the Daily Sentinel: http://www.gjsentinel.com/search/content/news/stories/2007/08/24/8_26_www_no_vacancy_WWW.html
It's just a bit amazing I think.