Multifamily Downturn Q&A - May 26th, 2020

by Donald Davidoff | May 26, 2020 12:00:00 AM

Each week our "downturn" roundtable enables us to discuss current pricing and revenue management (PRM) issues with some of the most experienced PRM practitioners in the industry. Each week we summarize the most recent insights. Below we summarize the audience responses to prompts (all answers are anonymous) on our most recent call (May 20) along with some information we re-shared from RealPage. If you have different insights or questions that you would like us to address in the coming weeks, please leave them in the comments or contact us through the site. This week we opened up with a discussion about some key metrics we saw in a RealPage blog: Despite the pandemic, occupancy April remained well above the prior ten-year average and slightly above April 2019. Strong February and March occupancies helped with that as April 2020 occupancy was below March 2020. Normally April occupancy is higher than March Through mid-April, canceled move-outs were roughly double the historical norm. We look forward to future reports to see how long this tailwind sustains Retention rates in April were at least 400bps higher than normal (at 57.9%) All the above was at the expense of rent growth. Effective asking rents went from >2.5% YOY to 1.0%, the largest drop we've seen in our entire history in the industry The focus on asking rents can be misleading: executed effective rents were down 4.5% YOY, and likely will drop further