Pittsboro Property Manager Eric Andrews explains how long it takes to rent a house out in Chatham County. The sweet spot is the $900 – $1,200 range, and those homes rent fast.
Speaker 1: How long does it take to rent a house in Pittsboro?
Eric Andrews: Well, it’s all over the place. Certainly in Pittsboro, the sweet spot is nine to $1,200. If you can stay in that range, those things, we’re usually in a multiple tenant situation in 24 to 48 hours. That’s red, red, red, hot. And if we look backwards, if the average family in the US is making 46, $47,000, the average family in the Pittsboro area is making 35 to 40,000. Then a third of their income going to rent puts you right in that sweet spot of 1,200 bucks. And those numbers might sound low to some people or whatever, and that’s like a combined family income, but sometimes it is just a single mother or a single father. The fact of the matter is a lot of the people that are renting right now are renting, because they can’t buy real estate.
We have very few that are vacant right now, they usually get rented really, really quick. There are some interesting facts that will make it a little bit different. If you have a really big yard that is considered by some tenants a liability if they have to mow it themselves, or if you have a really big yard that might make the property very valuable to the landlord as a resale. But as far as rent is concerned, we’re just renting the house so you have to look at the house by itself. It doesn’t matter that it’s on five or 10 or 20 acres, it’s the house that’s being rented. We see a continuation of the strength in the rental market.
One of the problems is prices are appreciating so much in Pittsboro that we’re not able to get that 10 year recapture, we’re not able to play the 1% rule. If you buy something for 300,000 right now, it’s not going to pay for itself in 10 years, it’s probably going to pay for itself in 12 or 14 years. And if you buy something for 300,000, there’s no way I’m getting 3,000 a month for you. It’s probably going to be in the 1,800 to 2,200 range. We do have some rentals right now there in the 2,500, 2,800 range, but those are four, five and $600,000 homes. The rental market is super, super red hot right now as far as… And tenants are having trouble finding stuff and the availability, it’s scarce. The amount of homes that are available is very, very low.
