Where Is Your Landlord? We’ve Got Some Data To Show You

Philadelinquency has gotten its hands on some good L&I Housing License data.  Since we’ll be out most of the week doing errands and other Labor Day stuff, we thought it would be good to start off our vacation by showing you some of the first statistics that we’ve come up with using these records.  Most interesting of all are the contact addresses that landlords are putting on the Housing License application forms.

Presently in the City of Philadelphia there are 69,808 active rental licenses.  (Note: this does not include PHA-owned rentals).

Out of those, 64% of landlords put a Philadelphia address as the contact on the application form.   36% of landlords are listing a non-Philadelphia contact address on 24,964 active licenses.

Excluding Philadelphia, these are the top 20 towns where landlord contacts are registered with L&I:

If you put together the entire NYC area, we counted at least 1,883 active rental licenses in the New York area.  Adding together Huntingdon Valley with its close neighbor Southhampton, PA, the biggest landlord concentration close to Philadelphia is by far, Huntingdon Valley with 1,286 licenses.

Now, does this mean Philadelphians are really 2/3 of all landlords?   Of course not.   We’re seeing plenty of evidence of landlords using contact addresses that point back to other Philadelphia properties, which are also rentals.   While this is normal for registrations of managed apartment complexes and scattered-site rental housing, it’s more indicative of shady landlords who are trying to hide their identity.

Now it’s not fair to single out Huntingdon Valley even though it’s the top Pennsy suburb with the highest landlord concentration.   If we scale back and look a bit at the region, if you consider everyone in Pennsylvania outside Philly, South Jersey and New York you’ll see that overall, landlords are typically Pennsylvania residents, although not Philadelphia.

Pennsylvanians outside Philly by far make up the most out-of-City landlords. More than South Jersey and NYC combined.

Now that we have our hands on this data, we’ll be doing some more number crunching, including getting a look-see at the property tax situation on the properties that these landlords are renting out.