REFinBlog

As home ownership rates declined in the past decade, more and more people have opted to rent homes. This provided a niche market for young professionals: luxury rental home communities.

Arizona-based NexMetro Communities has developed Avilla Homes, which COO Josh Hartmann calls a “hybrid between single-family living and apartment living,” with communities in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, as well as recent expansion into Denver and Dallas suburbs.

Hartmann said the draw of Avilla Homes is it is a unique hybrid: providing the feel of living in your own house without the responsibilities of being a homeowner. It incorporates some aspects of apartment living, such as on-call maintenance, but focuses on the draw of living in a single-family home, such as four-walled individual units with one’s own yard space.

“I think (owning a home) is less of a draw for investment’s sakes and if you take that away, owning a home is a lot of work,” Hartmann said. “You have to be constantly fixing things. What the real draw of our product is that you don’t have to worry about all those things but you still get to live in a home.”

When the project first began in Tucson in 2011, the board of directors thought its main consumer would be people who lost their homes in the recession and were looking to rent. But the project ended up being a success with an unexpected demographic-the millennials.

Hartmann attributes millennials’ attitude toward homeownership and how they spend their money as a factor in the communities’ success. He estimates that about 65 percent of Avilla Homes’ customers are early in their career, between the ages of 25 and 34.

“I just think what they want to spend the dollars they make on is different than what my generation or the generation before me did,” Hartmann said.

David Reiss, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School says lifestyle changes coupled with the recession caused many people to turn to renting. The nation’s home ownership was down to 63.7 percent in the first quarter of 2015 from about 69 percent in 2004, according to census data.

“Another piece of it is kind of long term trends: Household formation, student loans that millennials have, another thing is income and job security,” said Reiss. ” A lot of things people have in place before they want to be a homeowner are not in many households.”