Nearly 11% of U.S. Houses Are Empty

By Diana Olick, CNBC Real Estate Reporter

NEW YORK (CNBC) -- I usually find the quarterly homeowner vacancy and homeownership report from Census pretty lackluster, but the latest one released this week was anything but.

America's home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That's down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998.

Homeownership is falling at an alarming pace, despite the fact that home prices have fallen, affordability is much improved and inventories of new and existing homes are still running quite high.

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Bargains abound, but few are interested or eligible to take advantage.

More concerning than the home ownership rate is the vacancy rate. The Census tables don't tell the entire story, but they tell a lot of it. Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30,000 in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year-over-year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.

Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2010 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think.

The number of vacant homes for rent fell by 493,000, as rental demand rose. 471,000 homes are listed as "Held off Market" -- about half for temporary use, but the other half are likely foreclosures. And no, the shadow inventory isn't just 200,000, it's far higher than that.

So think about it. Eleven percent of the houses in America are empty. This as builders start to get more bullish, and renting apartments becomes ever more popular. Vacancies in the apartment sector have been falling steadily and dramatically. Why? Because we're still recovering emotionally from the toll of the housing crash.

Younger Americans have seen what home ownership has done to their friends and families, and many want no part of it. Credit has become very nearly elitist. Home prices, whatever your particular data provider preference might be, are still falling.

Banks, Fannie(FNMA) and Freddie(FMCC) are holding on to hundreds of thousands of properties, and we don't know exactly when or how they'll sell them.

-- Written by Diana Olick of CNBC

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