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Rental Housing Finance Survey
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The Rental Housing Finance Survey provides a current and continuous measure of financial, mortgage, and property characteristics of rental housing properties in the United States.
The survey focuses on the financing of rental housing properties, with emphasis on new mortgages, refinanced mortgages, or similar devices such as deeds of trust or land contracts, and the characteristics of debt originations.
The 2021 RHFS includes single-family residential and multifamily residential properties with at least one housing unit intended for rent. Data collection will be conducted from June 2021 through November 2021. The reference period of the survey is all 12 months of 2020. Data collection is conducted in two phases. During Phase I, cases that include respondent contact information will first receive a letter inviting them to self-respond online using the Census Bureau Respondent Portal. The Census Bureau Respondent Portal allows respondents to complete surveys online. Respondents will create an account or login to an already existing account. They will link to the RHFS by using the authentication code provided to them in the initial letter sent from the Census Bureau. During Phase 2 field staff will begin searching for property owners and managers for cases that did not include sufficient respondent contact information and conduct interviews. Additionally, field staff will contact cases that did not self-respond during Phase 1 and conduct interviews.
Detailed Methodology
2012: Random sample of Basic Street Addresses from the Census Master Address File (MAF), filtered based on areas where 80 percent of units are rental.
2015: 10,257 rental housing properties selected from two sources: the 2013 American Housing Survey (AHS) Sample and the January 2014 Master Address File Extract Files (MAFXs) in the same geographic areas.
2018: A random sample of rental property owners across the United States using a web-based instrument.
2021: The RHFS sample frame is a single frame based on a subset of the 2019 American Housing Survey (AHS) sample units.
- Mixed or multi modes
- Survey (self- or interviewer-administered)
Data users should exercise caution when making comparisons between the 2015 and 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey estimates. The 2015 sample design used separate frames for single and multi-unit addresses. Single unit rentals were selected from a frame of eligible rental units identified in the 2013 American Housing Survey (AHS) sample and multi-unit addresses were selected from a frame based on a list of basic street addresses on the Master Address File (MAF) located in 2013 AHS sample Primary Sampling Units (PSUs). The 2018 sample design used a single frame based solely on addresses of rental units identified in the 2017 AHS. The 2017 AHS was based on the new sample that was redesigned in 2015, while the 2013 AHS was based on the previous AHS sample design. Thus, the post-stratification of unit control totals had very different distributions across survey years. The differences between 2015 and 2018 RHFS estimates of rental properties can be largely attributed to the differences in the post-stratification of unit control totals and the increase in average property size as measured in units per property between the 2015 and 2018 RHFS sample designs.