The COVID-19 pandemic has laid the foundation for a future rental crisis. Landlords are tightening their screening criteria, which means renters who have been evicted for any reason will have a much harder time finding a new place to rent. The housing supply shortage has made things worse, causing rental prices to increase across the board. Even tenants who have not been evicted but who moved by choice or left involuntarily are likely to face much higher rental payments.

We partnered with Avail, an online platform that provides rental management tools for do-it-yourself landlords, to survey landlords and tenants about the challenges they’ve faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our new analysis of the landlord data, from the January 2022 survey, includes responses from more than 1,100 landlords nationwide, of whom more than 70 percent owned no more than four properties. These data painted a picture of the difficulties ahead for both landlords and tenants.

The number of evictions has fallen during the pandemic, largely because of the federal eviction moratorium and state and local moratoriums. Despite the federal moratorium, landlords could still evict tenants who created a nuisance, and 38 percent of landlords who missed rental incomes initiated eviction proceedings.

But eviction is not the only way to vacate units. Survey data show that for landlords who missed rental income because of tenant nonpayment, 59 percent encouraged the tenant to vacate the property, 27 percent did not renew the tenant’s lease, and 22 percent mutually terminated the lease.

With the federal moratorium now lifted, landlords may evict their tenants directly. In the next three months, 44 percent of landlords whose tenants missed rental payments said they are considering encouraging tenants to vacate the property, with close to 60 percent of them thinking of initiating eviction proceedings. The majority of landlords (51 percent) said it would take two to three months to trigger an eviction, but more than a third were willing to trigger an eviction after only one month of missed rent. Although we do not expect an eviction tsunami, these numbers suggest eviction numbers could rise substantially in the months ahead.

Read the full article about the housing rental crisis by Jung Hyun Choi, Laurie Goodman, Daniel Pang at Urban Institute.