I'm not an expert in this area but I suspect there is more of a US apartment market than you think.

Of course specific cities are going to show deviations from the national trend. Take a look at the Case-Shiller index[0]. You can add comparisons between the national index and major city indexes.

There is probably strong spatial autocorrelation (Minneapolis and St. Paul are more similar than Minneapolis and Atlanta) but cities that share characteristics (e.g. population size, density, etc.) would also share similar trends.

[0] http://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-...

Ooh, that's a really fun visualization.

Looks like Detroit has actually been on the rebound since 2012, though still below original levels. Denver and Dallas are really taking off. You can really see the housing crash hammering Phoenix and Vegas.

My quick take is that there are some big trends that are correlated nationally, but they'll be more or less pronounced region by region, and some cities have their own special issues.

I'm not sure what your question is. There are millions of apartments in the US. How would there not be a market?

Sorry, to be clear: I mean, is there a single market that's useful to track collectively, as opposed to just narrowing in on individual cities?

It seems like the apartment markets in Detroit, San Francisco, and Eudora are all going to be very different, hinging on radically different factors.

Some US economic trends will affect all three, sure, but... my instinct is that they won't resemble each other very much at all. Apartments that are hundreds or thousands of miles away aren't exactly fungible commodities.

I don't know much about this area though, so it was an honest question, maybe they're all more linked than I realized.

Of course every local market is distinct from every other, but there are some national factors that affect price in every local market. For example, mortgage interest rates are generally agnostic to location. Landlords pay a mortgage to buy the properties they rent, so the "price" of the mortgage (the interest rate + down payment) will affect the price of rent.

If the US national average for interest rates drops from 5% to 4%, you would expect to see downward pressure on rental prices across all markets. Sure, not every landlord is refinancing or getting a new mortgage, but as long as some contingent of landlords is able to undercut the going rate of rentals, they will exert downward pressure on the rental price in their local market.

I'm not disagreeing with your statement, but "mortgage interest rates are generally agnostic to location" isn't fully true. 'Risk of default' and 'ease of finding a new buyer after a default' are factors in determining the rent one pays on a mortgage, and lenders may use location as a factor in assessing those.

For example, if a bank has to repossess a house in the valley, it will not have much problems finding a new buyer. For a house in Detroit, that likely is different.

That likely doesn't have much effect on deltas in the short term, though, as those factors are relatively stable.

What I assume parent was asking was whether it is meaningful to talk about aggregate apartment demand across the US as a whole. While it may be a useful number for some purposes, it's not necessarily very meaningful for discussing vacancy rates and pricing in a given location.

There are real estate investment trusts (REITs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U...) that have exposure to more than just one location....

Also many PE firms have been investing heavily ($B) in rentals via "buy to rent" loans or "bridge loans." So there is definitely a lot of institutional money flowing into the rental market.