After the global financial crash, it seemed like the housing market would take years to work through its inventory of unwanted single-family homes – and it did. Investors bought hundreds of thousands of homes at low prices, often out of foreclosure, and put these homes out to rent. Now, however, there are far fewer homes available for sale, and many developers are turning to new construction to create new rental housing.
Northern Nevada’s largest home builder, Lennar, opened its latest community of new, single-family, detached homes, in March, in Sparks, Nevada. The 80 new homes at Frontera at Pioneer Meadows are available to rent, starting at $1,499 a month for a 1,210-sq.-ft. home and rising to $1,999 for 2,182 sq. ft., according to data from ApartmentGuide. “Customers are now able to benefit from Lennar’s superior homes and experience a convenient rental lifestyle,” according to Lennar.
The number of single-family homes intentionally built to be rental housing is still a tiny fraction of the home building overall, but it is growing quickly from effectively zero to become a new sector of the market for new development. “Last year, approximately 25,000 detached homes were built for rent. We believe that number will increase significantly over the next several years,” according to “A New Opportunity to Build Detached Homes for Rent,” a report from John Burns Real Estate Consulting, based in Irvine, Calif.
Currently, one-in-10 households live in single-family rental housing – that’s 12.7 million of the total 120 million households now living in the U.S., according to Burns. To serve these renters, leading master-planned community builders are likely to develop new, detached homes for rent, Burns forecasts.
