Vacancy is the property-management brief while purchase rates sit at 6.81%

The official occupancy series is the Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey. It is quarterly. It is national and regional. It is not your 48-unit building on a side street. Cite HVS for the country. Use your rent roll for the asset. Mixing the two is how marketing decks get people sued.

Rent inflation has its own official tape: BLS CPI rent of primary residence and owners’ equivalent rent. Those series tell you whether the average lease is still adding to inflation, not whether your concession last Tuesday “cleared the market.” We will quote the next CPI when it is published. We will not invent a same-store rent number for a city we did not survey.

Purchase rates leak into operations. A 6.81% 30-year — a three-week high after Warsh — keeps some households renting and keeps some owners from listing. That can support occupancy even when asking rent is tired. It can also hide deferred maintenance: people stay because moving is expensive, not because the roof is fine. The residential desk covers the for-sale side of that lock-in. This desk stays on the operating brief.

Commercial occupancy is a different stack — office, industrial, retail, and multifamily each have their own private surveys. This publication will use those only when a dated, named source is on the page. Until then, the public Treasury curve on the commercial desk is the honest financing backdrop for a commercial manager’s capex and refinance conversation.