Apartment Hunters Find Fewer Units, Higher Rents

Apartment hunters in Ventura County are having an increasingly difficult time finding affordable shelter, with few vacancies and rents rising much faster than inflation.

Three-bedroom, two-bathroom units now average $1,129 a month, up 7.5% over the same quarter last year, according to a survey by Realfacts, a San Francisco Bay Area research firm. The cost of a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment jumped by $47, or more than 6%, to $800 a month.

“Anything that is a rental is being flooded right now,” said Maria Pierce of Ven Co Properties, a Ventura-based real estate management firm. “It seems to be like that everywhere in Ventura right now. We have two [available] units on our list, out of 250 units.”

In combination with the ongoing home-buying crunch, which pushed up prices as much as 11% over the previous year, the rental report paints a picture of a county where people are having an increasingly difficult time finding a place to live.

Some real estate experts say the only thing keeping rents from going up even faster is fear of a voter backlash that could produce rent-control ordinances.

“Our rent increases aren’t very much because we don’t want to have rent control in Ventura,” said Pierce. “That’s the unspoken rule.”

With inflation currently standing at less than 2%, the surge in rents appears even more dramatic. A likely culprit is the fact that there are almost no apartments available in some places. Vacancy rates are hovering around 3.3% for most of the county. In Camarillo and Simi Valley, the rate is just 2%.

As a result, rent costs surged even higher in Simi Valley. “In our area, the increase was closer to 10%,” said Jon Haines, 1999 president-elect of the Simi Valley-Moorpark Association of Realtors. “It’s a volatile, volatile market, but over the last six months or so it has been very tight.”

Last month’s home sales jumped nearly 115% in Simi Valley, which also cut down on the supply of houses for rent.

Analysts say families are faring worst. “Large families are really having a hard time,” said Mary Schmenk, office manager for Alert Management Co. in Oxnard. The rent increase in two-bedroom, two-bathroom units was 6.9%, to $992 a month, according to the Realfacts survey.

Schmenk said her company has no vacancies in three- and four-bedroom units and doesn’t expect any soon.

The Realfacts report includes only apartment complexes with more than 100 units that are not subsidized or subject to rent restrictions. But the scarcity in the non-subsidized rental market has had severe spillover effects on at least one government housing support program.

Government housing advocates and analysts say property managers are less likely now to accept federal Section 8 housing certificates, which pay the full rent for qualified low-income families.

A lower acceptance rate and higher rents overall have pushed many poor families out of the county housing market altogether, said Edward Adams, chief operations officer with the county Area Housing Authority.

Adams estimated that the number of people finding housing with Section 8 certificates has fallen by about 30% from September 1997 to June, the last month for which figures were available.

“The trend has been for them to be less and less able to find housing even when they have a certificate in hand,” Adams said.

“They can’t find any that are affordable.”

Schmenk agreed that fewer apartment managers are accepting Section 8 tenants.

“Once the inventory gets tight, there’s no reason to take that program,” she said.