About one in eight houses may be vacant in Bermuda, according to the Department of Statistics Labour Force Survey report.

The data was released just as the country struggles with an acute housing shortage, which is making it difficult for some families to find homes and leading to rising prices in an already expensive market.

Out of the 1,551 households chosen for the survey, 181 were found to be vacant or derelict, approximately 11.7 per cent of the data set.

This is the first time these numbers have been broken out in the labour survey. Bermuda has approximately 27,400 homes.

According to real estate agents, rental prices are up by almost a third due to the increase of demand — some of the demand coming from digital nomads — and a shortage of available units. This has led to bidding wars for some properties.

The government has made increasing supply a priority and has targeted disused properties throughout the island for refurbishment.

“There is an acute housing shortage, resulting from the demand for housing outpacing the current supply,” according to the Economic Development Strategy Bermuda 2023-2027.

For the Labour Force Survey report, households were chosen at random from the 2016 Population and Housing Census, plus new assessment numbers from the Department of Land Valuation.

Using data from the 2016 Census, households were arranged into one of three income groups: low (with annual income of under $84,001), medium ($84,001 to $102,750) and high ($102,751 and over).

The report selected households of different income groups randomly based on the number of private dwellings listed on the Land Valuation list.

The selection was done proportionally to the income levels recorded in the 2016 Census.

By the end of the survey’s data collection period, only 1,211 households completed the survey, with the department being unable to solicit results from approximately 22 per cent of participant households.

Of the 340 households that could not or did not complete the survey, 151 households are classified as being under unknown eligibility.

Of these, 96 households did not complete the survey: 41 refused, seven were unable to owing to the death or illness of a household member, five were uncontactable because of no one being at home and two were unreachable as a result of the interviewer being threatened by a household pet.

Furthermore, 189 units were deemed illegible for the survey: 156 were classified as vacant dwellings, 25 as derelict dwellings, four as rest homes/care homes and four as businesses.

The report states that the sample pool did not allow for replacements when there was no response to interviewer telephone calls or in-person visits.