As recently as 1990, Americans earned only 0.5 per cent of their personal income from rents. Now they earn 4.5 per cent of their income from this source.
Since February 2007, more than 12 per cent of the total growth of personal income can be attributed to rising rental income, even though rents were only responsible for 1.5 per cent of personal income ten years ago. Put another way, rental income has more than tripled in the past decade during a period when employee compensation only grew by 31 per cent.