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Hey everyone, you're listening to On the House with Spartan, an ad-free podcast brought to you by a full-service turnkey company.
I'm your host, lindsay Davis, ceo and co-founder of Spartan Invest. On this show we talk about all things real estate, from market patterns, industry insight, construction, property management and other investment avenues. We hope you'll join as we dive into today's episode of On the House with Spartan. Welcome back to another episode of On the House with Spartan Invest. This episode is another in our feature of hot takes, in which we talk about just some news and topics that are on the top of real estate investors' minds and what's going on in the industry and kind of really give it from our perspective. As a turnkey provider in the southeast With a large property management company, a new construction company, we're able to provide a little bit of insight on how these events and news stories are affecting us as well. The topic today is the housing market. As far as rents and evictions, we have seen a drastic increase in evictions across the country as rents continue to increase. Now, as you can imagine, going through an eviction can sometimes be inevitable when you're dealing with real estate and tenants, and so Spartan Invest and Atlas Rental Property, our property management company, we really try to stay as informed as possible on what's going on in evictions, especially after the eviction moratorium, which I know we've talked very extensively about. Now there's this great website, evictionlaborg, and it tracks. It's something that we look at consistently and it does not necessarily track our particular markets, but several markets across the country and it tracks kind of the. It's a Princeton run website and so it's tracking the evictions from pre-COVID, post-covid to see the effects of COVID in regards to the eviction rate. So, comparatively speaking, looking at 2022, coming into 2023, compared to 2020, 2021, obviously, early in the pandemic court evictions, the moratorium drastically reduced the number of evictions that landlords could even file with the court. So we're going to look at 2021, when it became legal again for those landlords to file eviction on nonpaying tenants. Then, comparatively speaking to 2022. And, like I said, I'm quoting evictionlaborg and this is the 2022 reports and that landlords have filed nearly 970,000 eviction cases across the sites that they track those particular markets, which is a 78% increase compared to 2021. Some of the cities that we've seen the largest increase the number one is Las Vegas, number two is Houston, minneapolis, hartfield, jacksonville, columbus, fort Worth, dallas, nashville, and it kind of correlates a little bit with a lot of those markets that have seen a ton of appreciation.
Going to a article from Yahoo Finance. Eviction rates are rising across the country, with filings up more than 50% than pre-pandemic average in some cities, according to the eviction rates, and this is also at the same time that rents are soaring. Now, in July, rent prices grew 0.31% year-over-year according to rentcom's August 2023 report. Consequently, more cities are considering rent control, which can limit the increase in rent landlords can implement on private housing, for example, california, which already has several rent control policies in a number of their cities, will soon vote on a measure that would enable cities to expand rent control into 2024. Now, in regards to how we've seen the effect of this and that we also have experienced an increase in our eviction rate. So, prior to 2020, atlas Rental Property, which we currently manage a little over 2000 single family homes in Southeast we've got Alabama, georgia and Tennessee For our property management company we historically ran right at about 1% eviction rate. Sometimes it would fluctuate and that we would track in the winter months about a 1.5%, but historically we always remained less than 2% and right now we are seeing trends of 7% eviction rates and a couple of months ago we got as high as 8.5% eviction. So that is a huge jump for us.
My personal opinion this is a hot take. So this is just our opinion and in the real estate industry is I think it's a number of factors. I think inflation has really taken hold in the last 12 months of the average consumer and not realizing. We've seen credit card debt continue to soar, and you also have to take in consideration overall housing affordability. We've seen the real estate market continue to appreciate increase in price and really make a lot of middle income families not able to afford homes. But also that rent has continued to increase and a lot of information has been shown that as housing has continued to increase, the average household income has not followed suit. They have not moved at the same pace. So we've got rents that are now overpriced and families are just not necessarily able to afford them. And then they're having to pick and choose. Hey, what can I currently afford? Do I pay power bill, rent, et cetera, et cetera.
There are a couple of things just from a standpoint of what you can do in order to avoid evictions. Now, at Atlas Rental Property, we have a certain process in that we do when we're working with tenants, we allow some leniency not necessarily on repeat properties, but we do allow some leniency. And so if you are in the weeds or if you're dealing with this as an investor, you're managing your own property. I think the biggest thing you can do to try to proactively avoid a potential eviction is do a lot of due diligence on the front end. Make sure you talk to their current or previous landlord. Please, please, please, always make sure you get that rental reference. You're checking everything. You're checking their income, your verifying employment, you're checking paystubs, et cetera, et cetera. You're doing a lot of due diligence on that front end. And then also, so if you placed a tenant and now they are currently not paying, communication is a great way to just stay on the same levels. Okay, so if right now, if this particular month is hurting, maybe do a cash for keys situation so that way you can well, let's get you into a different property, go find another property. I'll give you $500 just to move out, and that saves the hassle of going to the court, getting in front of a judge, getting a writ filed serving eviction papers and then waiting for the sheriff's department to set out that particular tenant.
We've talked a lot about landlord-friendly states and that Alabama is one of the most landlord-friendly states. However, that does not mean that evictions do not happen. It means that judges and the court and the legal system tends to air on the side of the owner, slash landlord in regards to possession. That does not mean that they don't happen and that doesn't mean that sometimes they can last a little bit longer. So please keep that in mind.
When you find yourself in a situation, a lot of times it's just easier hey, you just want the property back, you want possession of your property so you can move forward, even if you need to adjust your rent accordingly. You know, if you need to bring it down 50 bucks, bring it down $100. I don't think in our particular markets we've seen that as a necessity. We've tried to be very strategic on our rent increases in that we've only seen about an 11% increase, 17 in some particular areas, but we're not trying to shoot for that 30, 40% increase because we want tenants to come in and stay. So while we've also experienced the 8% increase or the 6% increase in our average eviction rate, we're also not seeing a 78% increase in our eviction ratings. So taking that into consideration. But you have to get possession of your property back moving forward. So a lot of times it's just better to offer the cash for keys to get your property back.
And that's another hot take with Spartan Invest. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you, guys for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate, review and subscribe. If you want to learn more, check us out online at spartaninvestcom. Until next time, this is On the House with Spartan.
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