Home vacancy rate at all time high

Dean Baker, at the American Prospect, comes up with a very important finding. The housing vacancy rate in the U.S. is not only at an all time high, its more than 35% (that's percent, not percentage points) higher than it's ever been before:

This is another one of my preemptive strikes. Perhaps the most under-reported release of economic data is the quarterly data on housing vacancy rates from the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau just released the data for fourth quarter of 2006. This showed the vacancy rate for owner occupied housing hitting 2.7 percent. This is up 50 percent from the 1.8 percent rate of two years ago.

This is big news. The vacancy rate for ownership units has hovered near 1.5 percent for 50 years. It had never previously crossed 2.0 percent. The most recent Census Department estimates means that there are more than 2 million ownership units sitting vacant. In most cases, this means that an owner is paying a mortgage on a home for which they are collecting no rent. Few homeowners can afford to pay a mortgage on a house in which they don’t live for very long.

The industry has been trumpeting the increase in sales of new single family homes as a sign that the real estate slump is nearing its end. This certainly doesn't seem to indicate that's the case. If anything, this is a big overhanging threat, since you'd think most of these unoccupied homes will eventually have to be brought to market.