Homeowners displaced by Hurricane Florence may have a tougher time finding temporary housing than did others dislocated by different recent extreme weather events.
North Carolina's affected housing stock is in many smaller cities like Wilmington and Fayetteville, where the rental housing stock is mostly single-family homes, owned by smaller, local landlords, rather than larger rental companies, with fewer than 1,500 empty units per town, per apartment research firm RealPage Inc. “A lot of the cities that were flooded are smaller and less dense,” Ric Campo, chairman and chief executive of multifamily property owner Camden Property Trust, tells Realtor.com, “They just don’t have the apartment inventory.”
Hurricanes tend to be bad news for the for-sale housing market in the weeks after a big storm, leading to slower sales and more borrowers falling behind on their mortgages. But for rental landlords whose properties survive with little or no damage, disasters can be a boon. After Harvey, Houston’s vacancy rate fell to 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter from 7.3 percent in third quarter—a significant drop for such a short period. It eventually inched back up to 6.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, according to RealPage.