The final round of our survey is out! We hope that our previous participants will stick with the study, and that residential rental property owners who are receiving surveys for the first time this year will choose to participate. The survey should only take about 10 minutes to complete, and we cannot do this work without you.

I’m repeating myself from last year’s blog post, so please forgive me if you’ve heard all this before. But I want to make sure that everyone has the information they need! This study is being conducted by the Rental Property Research Consortium. What is that? It is a collaboration of researchers from five different universities who are interested in learning more about the experiences and behaviors of non-institutional residential rental property owners. Our team includes researchers who work in the fields of planning, housing, real estate, urban policy, sociology, statistics, and data science and our work is being supported with funding from the National Science Foundation. We began our work during the Covid-19 pandemic with the purpose of investigating how residential rental property owners were responding to the uncertainty and stress of the pandemic and have now expanded our investigation to investigating residential rental property owner decision-making across the stages of the disaster management cycle.

We are working to answer the following five questions about residential rental property owners (RRPOs):

• What is the relationship between RRPO characteristics and rental housing security within the COVID-19 post-pandemic context?
• What are the characteristics of the RRPO population (demographics, portfolio diversity, other characteristics)?
• How do RRPO career paths and their perceptions of the viability of their residential rental businesses change as a result of a disaster/shock?
• How do RRPO and tenant relationships and interactions change as a result of a disaster/shock?
• How do RRPO decisions regarding property maintenance and property management change as a result of a disaster/shock?

These research questions guide the questions we have included in our survey. So, if you are wondering why we are asking about your personal demographics or the details of your portfolio, that is why. This year, we received a lot of questions about how we found you. That is why we have data scientists on the team. It isn’t always easy to figure out what properties are rental properties and who owns what, so we include data scientists on our team who are tasked with just that question! They create models for us that we use to generate address lists. Please be assured that we are not market researchers and we don’t sell our lists. We simply use them to send out our surveys with those popular $2 bills.

Please keep following the dashboard as we continue to post survey results and the findings from our analyses.