Rental rates will flatten this year in Riverside and San Bernardino counties
Press-Enterprise
By Leslie Berkman
... Apartment dwellers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties will continue to pay the lowest rents in Southern California, but this year the tumble in rental rates will stop, according to a forecast released Wednesday by the University of Southern California. However, one premise of the report the impact of investors on the competition that apartments face from foreclosures in Inland Southern California is a matter of dispute...
... The report says because investors often are beating out would-be owner occupants in the competition to buy foreclosed homes, renters are not making the jump to home ownership in the numbers that once had been anticipated.
In addition, Tracey Seslen, who co-authored the Casden Multifamily Market Forecast, said a premise of the Inland forecast is that investors who buy up bank repossessed houses are planning to hold them without looking for renters until the real estate market recovers and the houses can be sold at a profit.
Seslen said the study relies on input from M/PF YieldStar, a national apartment research organization based in Houston. She said YieldStar concluded that because investors are paying cash for the bank-owned houses, they can afford to hold the houses off the rental market rather than take on a landlord's responsibilities...