As if the new home inventory wasn't tight enough, the
National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) say a higher proportion of those
homes are being built as rentals rather than owner occupancy. Robert Dietz, writing in NAHB's Eye on
Housing blog says the numbers are small, but the increase has continued for several
recent quarters.
From the first quarter of 2017 through the first three
months of 2018, construction starts for homes built specifically as rental
property rose from 33,000 to 37,000. Seven
thousand of those starts were in the first quarter of this year.
According to Census Bureau estimates, the market share
of single-family homes built to be rented (and not including those built and
sold to someone who then rents them out) accounted, on a one-year moving
average basis, for 4.3 percent of all single-family construction starts. This compares to the recent historic average
from 1992 to 2012 of 3.7 percent.

Dietz says that the Great Recession and the attendant decline in the
homeownership rate brought an increase in the share of built-for-rent homes. At the beginning of 2013 the share hit 5.8
percent.
Even at an increased rate, the total number of these starts remains small in
terms of the total size of the home building market. The built-for-rent share is also small within
the context of the whole single-family home share of the rental market, which
is 35 percent according to the 2015 American Community Survey.
Dietz says as homes age, they are more likely to be rented, therefore the bulk
of single family rentals come out of existing stock rather than new construction.
In fact, from 2005 to 2015, 56% of the growth in rental housing stock were due
to increases of for-rent single-family homes.