cover image: How Are Landlords Faring During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

20.500.12592/jbc8tm

How Are Landlords Faring During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

1 Mar 2022

10 The Impact of the Pandemic on Landlords’ Rental Business We now explore the impact of the pandemic on landlords’ rental business in 2020 and investigate the steps landlords have taken in response to pandemic-induced financial uncertainty. [...] Overall, the pandemic has led to a sharp increase in certain types of actions and a decrease in others.17 For example, 15 percent of landlords reported granting rental extensions to at least one of their tenants prior to the pandemic—in the pool of nine actions, this was the third most common that landlords reported taking in 2019. [...] In general, we find that landlords in the Upper Midwestern cities of Minneapolis and Racine collected the most rent pre-COVID; those in the Industrial Midwestern cities of Indianapolis and Akron as well as the West Coast cities of San Jose and Los Angeles collected slightly less; and those in the East Coast cities of Rochester, Albany, Philadelphia, and Trenton collected the least. [...] These findings support the notion that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the rental business of landlords across a variety of rental markets and political contexts and underscore the importance of looking at relative changes when examining the impact of COVID-19 on rental markets.21 In Figure 4, we present year-over-year changes in the percent of landlords reporting less than 50 percent. [...] Among the many concerning findings in our study is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the renters in and housing stock of communities of color.

Authors

Elijah de la Campa

Pages
50
Published in
United States of America