alt Hacker NewsIf you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.
Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.
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So long as the percentage of people who live in a home they own is high, there's not a great reason to care about owner occupancy.
You're just using it as a proxy for people owning homes. It's not a given that the two numbers are always opposed.
It's very easy to see that owner-occupancy is an incoherent metric.
Stipulate that owning a home is good.
As the number of homes goes up, owner-occupancy necessarily goes down (you can only occupy one home at a time). Homeownership might rise or fall while this is going on. But that doesn't matter; the number of homes going up is good, so the fact that the metric falls when it rises tells you that either (1) the metric is "evil", rising when bad things happen and falling when good things happen; or (2) the metric is incoherent and doesn't carry information about whether things are going well.
This depends heavily on the industry of the area. Go to a college town and you will find owner occupancy is not that big of a deal. Go to a luxury resort town and they literally make their money from non-residents transiently moving through.
I don't think you can get any of these situations non-organically. But schools and worker dormitories have a lot in common. More than most seem to admit to.