Apartments Easier to Find, but Rents Still High
It got a bit easier to find an apartment in Orange County as 1988 drew to as close, but finding one with a low monthly rent was still a chore.
Average rents in the county ranged from $570 to $1,006 a month, according to a fall survey done for the Apartment Assn. of Orange County.
That’s up significantly from the fall of 1987, when the range was $458 to $866.
On the bright side for renters, 6.2% of the apartments were vacant in the fall, up from 3.6% the year before.
Only 336 apartment complexes with 13,594 apartments responded to the survey, representing just a small slice of the county’s estimated 200,000 apartment units.
That’s not the only reason it’s a fuzzy snapshot of the county’s apartment market: It also doesn’t distinguish between different areas of the county.
Treating the market as a unified one hasn’t mattered in the past, but the north and south halves of the county now are beginning to behave as separate apartment markets, said William H. Kraus, executive vice president of the apartment association.
In the fast-growing southern half of the county, for instance, vacancy rates are high because builders have recently constructed a lot of apartments.
Those builders anticipated getting new tenants from the offices and factories going up in Irvine and elsewhere. Eventually they will, Kraus said, but until jobs catch up with apartments in those areas, the vacancy rate will remain high and rents won’t rise much, he said.
It was the densely developed northern half of the county that probably accounted for much of the rise in rents that the survey found.
As interest rates have climbed, north county renters who might have once bought homes in San Bernardino and Riverside are staying put in their apartments. That means that vacancy rates stayed low in many north county cities and that rents probably rose, said Kraus.
“This is one of the first times the apartment industry has not seen the county move as a single economic unit,” he said.
The survey is done twice a year by researchers at the Real Estate and Land Use Institute at California State University, Sacramento.
