If you are renting now, this may just be the perfect time to enter the buying market and take control of your monthly housing payment.

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Daily Real Estate News | Thursday, April 23, 2015

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CEOs of the largest companies renting out single-family homes say they plan to raise rents up to 5.7 percent this year. Investors are switching their focus from buying properties to optimizing the revenue from the thousands of properties they bought, taking advantage of the increased demand for rental homes, Bloomberg reports.

Read more: Why Renters May Be in Trouble

“In the 2015 rental season, we’re really seeing the ability to move rents,” David Singelyn, chief executive officer of American Homes 4 Rent—the largest publicly-traded single-family landlord, with about 35,000 homes—said at a recent conference in Miami Beach, Fla.

Large-scale investors—those who purchase at least 10 properties a year—have spent about $68 million snatching up 528,000 single-family rental homes since 2011, according to a report last month by Haendel St. Juste, a Morgan Stanley analyst. Now the CEOs of Silver Bay, Starwood Waypoint, American Residential Properties, and Blackstone Group all say they plan to raise rents this year.

“We are focusing aggressively on rent bumps,” Stephen Schmitz, American Residential Properties CEO, said during a panel discussion. “There’s a supply imbalance in some markets. The same thing that keeps occupancy high also drives rents.” Schmitz says they plan to bump up rental rates by 4 percent on renewals and up to 5.7 percent for new tenants.

Source: “U.S. Single-Family Landlords Are Raising Rents, CEOs Say,” Bloomberg (April 21, 2015)