A quarter of American neighborhoods are majority-renter. They're a different retail country.

If you can only know one number about a trade area, take the renter share. Not income — renter share. It's the fastest single sorter of which retail categories belong at an address, and it splits the country more sharply than most people expect.

We ran the split across every populated census tract in America. Out of 84,000-plus neighborhoods:

• 20,709 tracts — one in four — are majority-renter.
• A third of tracts sit under 20% renters: the owner-dominated suburbs and exurbs.
• The rest are the mixed middle.

Those aren't two shades of the same market. They're two countries.

The numbers

Source: IQ Locations analysis of 2024 ACS 5-year data, U.S. census tracts with population above 500.

Ten years of age and $39,000 of household income separate the two, before you've looked at a single other variable. Renter share drags half the demographic profile along with it — age, income, household size, vehicle access, how often people move. (It's also why we treat "renter-occupied share" as a headline number on our reports, not a footnote.)

Same storefront, opposite meaning

Run a few categories through the split and the sorting is almost automatic.

A laundromat in an owner-dominated tract is fighting 90 in-unit washers per 100 households; in a majority-renter tract it's infrastructure. Self-storage feeds on the churn — renters move roughly three times as often as owners, and every move is a lease signup. High-frequency value formats live on the density and the younger age curve.

Flip it for the owner categories: home improvement, lawn and pool services, garage-adjacent anything. A pressure-washing franchise in a 70%-renter tract has almost no one to sell to — the addressable driveway count is the real market, not the population count.

And some categories just re-price rather than disappear. Coffee works on both sides of the split; the format and the ticket change. Fitness works on both sides; the concept changes. That's the analysis that a single metro-level average will never surface, because the metro contains both countries at once — the New Braunfels teardown two weeks ago had a 65%-renter tract and a 23%-renter tract almost within sight of each other.

The renter share for any specific address is public data, current to the 2024 ACS release, and it's on the first page of a demographic report. Before the next site visit, it's worth the 30 seconds to learn which country the address is in.