Virtually Every Home In South Bay Real Estate Market Occupied
SAN JOSE (CBS SF) – A new report finds the real estate market in the South Bay has the lowest residential vacancy rate in the United States, with 99.8 percent of homes being occupied.
RealtyTrac found at the beginning of February, only 858 out of 443,387 homes in the San Jose metropolitan statistical area were unoccupied, a vacancy rate of 0.2 percent. The company found 78 percent of the vacant homes had equity, a sign of the area's booming real estate market.
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Vacancy is also very low in the San Francisco area, with only 0.3 percent of homes in the market being unoccupied.
"This is a very good time to be a seller of real estate throughout the Bay Area. And it's not a bad time to be a landlord because you can take care of your vacancies very quickly," Rick Smith of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors told KPIX 5.
Other major cities with low vacancy rates include Los Angeles, Boston and Denver.
Nationally, the group found 1.6 percent of the nation's residential properties were vacant in their latest analysis, down 9.3 percent from late last year.
Flint, Michigan has the highest home vacancy rate in the country. As the city deals with an ongoing crisis involving lead in the water supply, 11,605 out of 154,137 homes are vacant, a rate of 7.5 percent.
To come up with their numbers, RealtyTrac analyzed the owner-occupancy status, equity and foreclosure status of nearly 85 million homes, matching it against vacancy data from the U.S. Postal Service.
Tim Fang is a digital producer for CBS San Francisco. A native of the Bay Area, follow him on Twitter @fangtj.