The Baton Rouge metro area experienced a slight bump in housing vacancies in 2017, though the increase wasn’t significant enough to indicate a change in housing demand, Governing magazine reports.
Roughly 13.6% of the Baton Rouge’s housing inventory—for both rental and owner-occupied properties—was vacant last year. That’s a change of 1.3 percentage points over 2016 when the metro area had a housing vacancy rate of 2.1%. The percentage change, however, falls below the survey’s margin of error for this market.
Governing’s analysis is based on newly released U.S. Census Bureau estimates that depict changes in housing vacancies across the U.S. The magazine examined the data for 75 metro areas. As was the case in Baton Rouge, the picture didn’t change much nationally.
Six metro areas registered annual increases that were statistically significant, and 25 other areas recorded small year-over-year increases that did not exceed the margin of error. Nationally, the vacancy rate was 11.3% in 2017.
Greater vacancies aren’t necessarily indicative of a lack of demand for housing because new units going on the market could push up the rates, Governing says.
Pittsburgh recorded the largest drop of minus 4.1%.
