At The Money: Grab Your Summer Rental Soon!!

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:25)
Memorial Day Weekend has come and gone, but if you're thinking about getting a place for the summer, you better get a move on it. There's still inventory around, but a lot of the prime spots, they're already spoken for.
I'm Barry Ritholtz, and on today's At the Money, we're going to talk about summer beach rentals. Renting, buying, what's hot, what's not. To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your tan lines, let's bring in Jonathan Miller. He's the Director of Markets for Street Matrix and co-founder of Miller Samuel. His market reports covers all sorts of summer and beach related areas including the Hamptons, the North Fork, the Jersey Shore, all along the rest of the country that has an active vacation property.
So Jonathan, before we get into the details, let's start really broad. What is the summer rental market? Tell us about the broader real estate market.

**Jonathan Miller** (1:27)
Well, I think it's a matter of consumption spending.
When the economy is doing well, they see this beach rentals as another commodity that they can buy. I saw this, I grew up in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which was the Hamptons of Washington, DC. It was nicknamed the summer capital. And the hotel occupancy, my dad had a hotel there. You could see it fluctuate with, depending on how well the economy was doing in DC itself. It was quite direct.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:05)
So around here, the Hamptons gets all the attention. And obviously, there's a lot of celebrity and a lot of media out there. But what do you see in other markets like the Berkshires, the Great Lakes, Mountain Destinations, Cape Cod? What else is interesting?

**Jonathan Miller** (2:22)
So the way I think of it is that just in the real state or the housing market itself, there's this sort of bias towards the higher end. I don't mean the very, very top of the market. But the more affluent somebody is, the more likely they're to go to one of these vacation spots. And with rising interest rates, that's making home ownership for primary residences more expensive. So that's reducing traffic to locations that are more defended on sort of working in middle-class consumers.
You know, I look at it as there's been this sort of change in the way consumers are thinking about summer rentals. And a broker, a friend of mine out in the Hamptons gave me a name for it. It's called Amazonified or Amazonified, which is people are more inclined, hey, listen, you run out of mouthwash. You just open your phone and you order it, right? You want a summer rental, you just open your iPhone and you start looking at it. And there's an understanding that you can get it at the last minute. When my parents used to have a home on Shelter Island in the Hamptons, and basically if you weren't rented for the season by February, then it was kind of a failure or it was an underwhelming sort of performance. Now, you know, it's last minute. And so, you know, one of the sort of evidence of this was that there was a noticeable uptick in traffic after Memorial Day, which would historically be, you know, the market's over.
And there's also a lot of thought that that's going to be the same story after July 4th, which is sort of the last sort of marker for the beginning of the rental season. You know, I think coming out of the pandemic, I think orientation towards last minute is sort of a structural change that's going to be with us indefinitely.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:48)
It's funny you say that my experience with Fire Island during grad school was you would put together a share house in October, like February is way late, like October, November for the following Memorial Day. And, you know, I look at a website like Out East, 4,500 Hamptons rentals available, including 1,077 in East Hampton, 889 in South Hampton, active listings still available for June, July, August through Labor Day, short-term or full season. So this isn't so much an economic indicator as it is just an appified world. We're just used to everything on demand, order a movie on demand, order toothpaste on demand, order a summer beach house on demand.

**Jonathan Miller** (5:46)
I think that's the way to think of it. And you know, what's interesting is, you know, on one hand, there's inventory available, you know, a fair amount of inventory. Part of that is because during the pandemic, we had rental property that had, you know, sort of annually have been traditional rental property. That was all purchased. And so now we have a new universe of renters that are effectively early or, you know, recent home buyers. And so we have sort of a whole new market developing.