More than 1.3 million – or 1.6 percent of the nation’s nearly 85 million residential properties – are vacant. That’s down 9.3 percent from the third quarter of 2015, according to RealtyTrac’s first quarter 2015 Residential Property Vacancy Analysis.
Read more: Holding Firm Against the Tide
“With several notable exceptions, the challenge facing most U.S. real estate markets is not too many vacant homes but too few,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac. “The razor-thin vacancy rates in many markets are placing upward pressure on home prices and rents. While that may be good news for sellers and landlords, it is bad news for buyers and renters and could be bad news for all if prices and rents are inflated above tolerable affordability thresholds.” RealtyTrac analyzed 147 metro areas with at least 100,000 residential properties and found that the following cities had the fewest number of vacant properties in the first quarter:
- San Jose, California: 0.2%
- Fort Collins, Colo: 0.2%
- Manchester, N.H.: 0.3%
- Provo, Utah: 0.3%
- Lancaster, Pa.: 0.3%
- San Francisco: 0.3%
- Los Angeles: 0.4%
- Boston: 0.5%
- Denver: 0.5%
- Washington, D.C.: 0.5%
Meanwhile, vacancies were highest in the first quarter in these cities:
- Flint, Mich.: 7.5%
- Detroit: 5.3%
- Youngstown, Ohio: 4.4%
- Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas: 3.8%
- Atlantic City, N.J.: 3.7%
- Indianapolis: 3%
- Tampa, Fla.: 2.9%
- Miami: 2.8%
- Cleveland: 2.8%
- St. Louis, Mo.: 2.6%
Source: RealtyTrac
