Kingston, PA - oversaturated market?

[Jim Stevenson]

I've been looking at Kingston, PA as a possible rental market. In trying to determine rents I checked out the rental ads on Craigslist. There's 107 ads just for Kingston (population of 13k). I thought this seemed rather high for a smaller town so I looked at the number of units available in Philadelphia (population of 1.5M) which is only 42.

Does this mean that Kingston is probably oversaturated with available rentals and I should steer clear from the area? It seems like supply is high and demand is low.

[Zachary Corum]

Hi @Jim Stevenson Here is a little more data on the Kingston market that will hopefully help you make a better decision. I don't have access to the MLS so all data that I have collected is from Realtor.com, and other public sites.

Here are all the sales of Rentals in Kingston over the last two years that have posted on Realtor.com this is a bit broad so we will look at trending next.

Here are the two unit sales over the last two years.  You can infer a slight downward trend on Two Unit sales in Kingston.

Here is the three unit sales trend as well.

Here are some Ideas around the downward trend on the Kingston 2 unit sales.  It seems that there is a glut of overall quality apartments on the market currently.  This is leading to a saturation of older less desirable apartment buildings which are fetching lower than market rates.

Right now Kingston seems to be a solid market as it also has one of the lowest average discount percentages compared to other close by markets.  This also means that you might not be getting as good of a deal on a two unit apartment building as you would in a different town near by.  A similar building in Pittston is selling with an average discount of 16%.

As with most information on this site this data and analysis is purely based off of opinion, I would recommend consulting with a real estate professional that has experience with multi-family apartments and working with investors.  If you message me I would be happy to provide you with mine.

Good luck investing and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out.