Economy Watch: There Are Fewer Apartment Applicant Deadbeats Than Before via Multi-Housing News Online

The U.S. apartment market has been strengthening in a number of ways—occupancies, rental rates, ROI—for a number of years now, but that’s not the only optimistic metric for the industry. CoreLogic tracks the overall likelihood that apartment applicants won’t be able to pay their rents; their creditworthiness, in other words. It turns out that the risk in the renter pool is lower now than any time since the onset of the recession. In some ways, that’s an entirely intuitive result, since the economy has been getting better for the last five years, slowly but surely, and other metrics of individual financial problems are also becoming more positive, such as personal bankruptcy and residential foreclosure rates.

But there seems to be more to the strength of renters than a rising economic tide. According to CoreLogic, the risk of default among renters nationwide dropped in the first quarter year-over-year, as reflected in its SafeRent Renter Applicant Risk (RAR) Index.

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