[ch4s3]

Vacancy doesn’t mean units held empty as either a parking place for cash or held off the market. Vacancy happens when you’re painting and repairing between rentals. Vacancy happens when there’s a renovation. Things like that are normal and not nefarious. Have 1.4% vacancy rate means there is essentially no usable housing for rent.

I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who don’t use them for anything.

[quodlibetor]

My understanding is that vacancy means available units for rent. So, plausibly, if you say 50 of the 100 units in your building aren't available for rent because you say they're being painted then they don't contribute to the vacancy of your building.

That's almost the exact opposite of your definition, but I agree that a 1.4% vacancy rate means there's almost nothing available for rent.

I'm having trouble finding an official definition from a source that reports them, but my definition matches things that I can find online, eg https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/vacancy-rate-what-does...

[vel0city]

Do you have any actual data on the rate of unoccupied properties that are not recently or soon to be available to rent in any major US markets? It seems like kind of hard data to find from my brief perusing around. I'm very interested in seeing some reliable data on this.

I had thought such units would have been included in the housing vacancy statistics, but apparently they are not.

[ch4s3]

I haven’t spent much time looking at any place other than New York. But there’s census data, tax data, and a lot of public records. The number of empty units is small. The total is probably close to 40k, but that’s a fuzzy number and moving target. That includes regular vacant units.

https://gothamist.com/news/how-many-nyc-apartments-are-vacan...