Apartment Building Investment: People aren’t buying homes anymore but still need shelter.
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
In the aftermath of the worst housing crisis in a generation, more people are eschewing the American dream of homeownership and embracing apartment rentals in the still-fragile economy.
Surging demand for apartments, particularly by younger consumers, has given a boost to the nation’s apartment landlords. Multifamily properties represent one of the few corners in the commercial real-estate industry where rents are rising rapidly. As such, lenders are giving the green light to multifamily construction projects even as development grinds to a halt in other property sectors.
“People weren’t buying homes anymore, but they still needed shelter, Read more
Q2 Local Metro Apartment Building Investment Reports Now Posted.
Filed under: Apartment Building Investment Cycle, Apartment Finance, Multifamily Design & Development, The Economy and Current Affairs
M&M tracks 40 metro apartment investment markets and delivers quarterly reports on occupancy, rents, absorption, new construction and permits (See list below). You may have to register with them to access the reports.
Apartment Construction Trends for Phoenix Q2 2012
If you have questions about a specific market Read more
Portland Apartment Market to add 31,000 jobs this year, vacancy to fall below 3%.
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
As the next building cycle for the Portland area is still another year out, vacancy rates are expected to fall to historic lows across the metro. The overall vacancy rate will match the lowest on record at 2.7 percent, while the area’s lower-tier vacancy will fall to as low as 2 percent.
Marcus & Millichap notes that a lack of multifamily construction and the expansion of jobs in the region will be the prime factors behind the extraordinarily high rates of occupancy. Job growth is expected to rise 3.1 percent—from 20,500 positions created in 2011 to 31,000 positions created in 2012. Of particular significance will be the development of a new Intel facility, which is expected to create thousands of construction jobs and spur large demand for Class B and C apartments.
Cap rates for trophy buildings are likely to average in the high 4-percent range, with Class A and B assets in Read more
Essex Prop. Trust on Seattle Apartment Building Investment: rents up 6.5%, NOI +11% but 10k new units coming
Filed under: Apartment Building Investment Cycle, Multifamily Investments
My Exec Sum: Seattle apartment building investment results from Essex Property Trust Q1 call:
- Seattle demonstrated exceptional same-store NOI and revenue growth of 11.2% driven by very limited supplies of housing and job growth that exceeds national averages
- On operating expenses we expect a 2.3% increase for the second quarter ’12 over the second quarter in ’11
- Seattle rents were up 6.5% compared to the first quarter of 2011. So depending on the submarket, we are now 4% below to even with our prior rent peaks.
- renewal offers for June and July averaged +6% to 8% in Seattle
- As of April 30, its occupancy was 96.1% with a net availability of 5.1%.
- We view this turnover activity (50-55% YoY) as healthy because it provides us with more opportunity to grow rents. Additionally, we only saw a nominal increase in move-outs due to home purchases and affordability.
- Cap rates continue Read more
Are we overbuilding multifamily already? Or just the wrong kind? Research from CBRE Econometrics
Filed under: Multifamily Design & Development, Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
At a Seattle apartment building investment conference recently one of the main speakers was saying that everyone who’d ever held a hammer, and their brother was trying to build apartments. That really struck a nerve in my market cycle conscious brain and was looking to get some perspective on that when a CBRE piece crossed my desk with this chart on it:
So while new unit construction starts are up significantly from the 2009 lows they are still well below the 89-08 average of about 250k. More importantly in relation to demographics we will be seeing increasing demand from growth in two of the prime renter groups, my exec sum from the piece below: Read more
Denver Job Growth catching up with Apartment Building occupancy and rent gains.
Filed under: Commercial Real Estate, Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
Apartment building investment buoyed by job growth in Denver
Video via Property Management Insider: http://youtu.be/uFjpYSbVdRg
Apartment fundamentals are strong essentially across the board in Denver, which ranked among the nation’s best with year-over-year rent growth of 6.5%
Do you know the Walk Score for your Multifamily property? Should you check before your next acquisition?
Filed under: Multifamily Design & Development, Multifamily Investments
How do apartment building residents actually want to live? Do they want sidewalks in front of their apartments and actual places to walk to—“Leave the car in the garage!” is a common refrain on real estate sites—or are Americans happy, as transportation analyst Alan Pisarski puts it, to “drive to where they can walk?” The truth is there are relatively few places in America that today would pass what architect Hal Box has dubbed the “Popsicle Rule”—“a child must be able to walk safely from home to buy a Popsicle within five minutes.”
How ‘walkable’ is your property? Your next apartment building investment? How do you figure that out?
Walk Score is a website that takes a physical address—enter yours here—and computes, using proprietary algorithms and various data streams, a measure of its walkability. More recently it’s started tracking how transit-friendly neighborhoods are too. What drives the score is choice and proximity—the more amenities (restaurants, movie theaters, schools) you have around you, and the closer they are, the higher your Walk Score.
“In most metropolitan areas, only 5 to 10 percent of the housing stock is located Read more
Will REO-rentals Really Compete With Apartment Building Investments?
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, REOs to Rentals- Single Family, The Economy and Current Affairs
Greg Willett, VP of research over at Real Page wrote a nice piece on that which covers it nicely; take it away Greg:
Thanks to one sentence uttered by Warren Buffett and some major overplay by the media, single-family rentals are a hot investment choice now. Thus, the analysts at MPF Research are fielding a constant stream of inquiries about whether the bulk sale of bank-owned single-family homes to investors who will operate them as rentals will impact the apartment sector.
Our take is that Read more
Clash of housing bottom fairy tales: Big Bad Wolves v. Robin Hood Investors.
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
My friend and fellow real estate investor Mei was asking about competition for single family REOs from big institutional players buying them at the courthouse as in the Bloomberg article here. The article profiles Waypoint, a Southern California real estate investing outfit that has developed some great technology to facilitate buying and leasing REOs. Check out Waypoint’s website, it’s the best example I’ve seen of the lease/option, credit repair, rent-to-own strategy for real estate investors.
It is a great question and one that I’d been wondering about too. Just so happens I was meeting with one of my private equity clients last week and we had a long conversation about that very subject. My client is the real estate/mortgage specialist at a 50B firm and they’ve been trying to crack this market profitably for about a year. Here’s the bottom line: Private equity needs to earn Read more
The Yin/Yang of Apartment Building finance: Urban Equity v. Suburban Debt.
Filed under: Apartment Finance, Multifamily Design & Development, Multifamily Investments
[Urban] TOD (Transit Oriented Development) has performed better and has a sexier image with many institutional investors. But while equity investors continue to favor urban TOD, developers are having a more difficult time finding construction debt at leverage levels that would make those deals pencil out.
Meanwhile out in the ‘burbs: “On suburban sites, you see yields in the 7 to 8 percent range. On the core infill, you’re really building to a 5, 5.25 percent, maybe, and that’s getting dangerously close to acquisition cap rates.”
“We’re in an interesting situation now, where anytime you have a Read more
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