The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) has been tracking apartment rent payments since the beginning of the corona virus pandemic across 11.4 million units of professionally managed apartment units throughout the country.  Rent collections have done better than expected since the onset of the pandemic and have remained strong. The graph below shows the full month’s rent collections for May-September 2020 compared to the same months in 2019. May fared the worst when compared to same month in 2019 but still only 1.5% points below the prior year.

We continue to see strong results in the multifamily market and remain confident in the asset class

For October, the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) found that 79.4 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by October 6. The share of apartment households who paid rent through October 6, 2019 was the same.  The share who paid by September 6, 2020 was 76.4 percent, lower than current month.  This result is more than two months after government stimulus expired in July and leads us to remain confident about the resiliency of the commercial multifamily asset class. We understand that the economic crisis is by no means over due to the continued impact from COVID-19 and the government’s evolving decisions on how to best help people being impacted. We will continue to monitor the performance and share with you our observations.