With young adults renting for longer than at any other point in history, more rentals are entering traditional MLS systems than ever before. Two companies heavily involved in this change, RentSpree and Rental Beast, presented at the 2022 RESO Spring Conference. Each covered a slew of interesting points about today’s renters, presented opportunities for change in how MLSs can work with rentals and discussed where we should be heading next under a RESO standards banner for greater interoperability and speed to market.
RentSpree CEO Michael Lucarelli presented “2022 State of the Rental Union.” | WATCH VIDEO (20:18 minutes).
Rental Beast Founder & CEO Ishay Grinberg, with his colleague, COO Josh Tayloe, presented “Rentals in the MLS: How Far We’ve Come, How Far We Have to Go.” | WATCH VIDEO (30:34 minutes)
Key takeaways from the two sessions were as follows:
The Rental Market
- Millennials are the largest generational group ever, and they are six to seven years away from purchasing homes.
- Over the past 30 years, wages are up 52% but home values are up 260%, making homeownership more difficult for younger buyers and maintaining them as renters for longer than previous generations.
- Nearly 40% of the U.S. population is renting, and that figure is 60% in major metropolitan areas.
- Approximately 113 million people are renting in the U.S. today.
- At 40%, Millennials represent the largest segment of today’s homebuyers, and they also account for 65% of renters.
Opportunities for Change
- More than 60% of rentals handled by agents never end up in the MLS.
- Over 3 million rentals are never input into the MLS.
- Commission opportunities on rentals range anywhere from $2.4 to $12 billion annually.
- In a 2021 survey, 81.6% of renters indicated that they plan to move in 2022, 88% of renters said they would reuse or refer their agent, and nearly 42% were planning to buy a home.
- Most owner-sourced rentals lack consistent data guidelines, so the RESO Rental Subgroup was created to fix this.
What’s Next?
- Fields in today’s extensive, time-consuming forms should be streamlined.
- User interfaces for rental input should be improved.
- The industry needs a better way to ensure accurate and up-to-date listings.
- MLSs that require rental listings to be submitted to the MLS have nearly three times the rental listings per member, so requiring rental input should be considered in order to make MLSs the center of rental activity.
- Among Rental Subgroup participants, approximately 40% of submitted data fields did not match existing RESO Data Dictionary values, and no participants were aligned 100%; metadata alignment is underway.
- The number of unique rental fields should be reduced and simplified for inclusion into the Data Dictionary.
As part of its overall mission, RESO supports the addition of clear, simplified and standardized rental fields in the Data Dictionary. RESO has a history of tackling all aspects of real estate for standardization, with the first big lift being property information for residential listings for sale. We have also incorporated fields into the Data Dictionary for office information, media details, Internet tracking, agent teams and much more.
In addition to rental standards, we are currently in the process of identifying common fields for appraisals, new construction, commercial real estate and offer management. Upcoming versions of the Data Dictionary will include recently approved additions related to showings, associations, lockboxes and transaction management.
Learn more about rental standards and many other relevant topics at the upcoming 2022 RESO Fall Conference in Sarasota, Florida, October 25–27.
