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Do you know the Walk Score for your Multifamily property? Should you check before your next acquisition?

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 Continue reading Do you know the Walk Score for your Multifamily property? Should you check before your next acquisition?

Portland Apartment Building Market: occupancy drops but rents still rising according to report

Apartments are a little easier to come by in the Portland area, but that’s not slowing down rent increases across much of the market.
According to the Metro Multifamily Housing Association which released its latest survey Wednesday:

Vacancy across the metro area grew to 3.72% from 3.34% late last year.
Rents climbed 3% in the same period, reaching $1 a square foot per month across the metro area.
Average two-bedroom unit now rents for $771, up $28 a month compared with six months earlier.

The Portland area has one of the lowest Continue reading Portland Apartment Building Market: occupancy drops but rents still rising according to report

Will REO-rentals Really Compete With Apartment Building Investments?

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 Continue reading Will REO-rentals Really Compete With Apartment Building Investments?

Seattle Multifamily Vacancy at 4.2% Says Dupre + Scott, average rents over $1,500 too.

For more on the Seattle area apartment building investment climate see the Seattle Times article here: Apartment rents likely to keep rising through 2012

Hat tip: Paul McFadden

Seattle Area Multifamily Report now posted on Reis Reports- Caps flat, rents mixed but vacancy down

See the report here: http://bit.ly/xm8uUG

Supply Shortage Continues in Multifamily. Apartment vacacny lowest in 11 years.

From WSJ Developments-

Little new apartment construction and surging demand has created a shortfall of 2.5 million units, the largest the nation has seen in more than a half-century, according to research from Nareit, a trade group for real-estate investment trusts.

As we’ve reported, apartment landlords are seeing vacancy rates decline as more Americans rent by choice or necessity. In the fourth quarter, apartment vacancy fell to the lowest rate since late 2001, with the national rate dropping to 5.2% from 6.6% a year earlier, according to Reis Inc. The vacancy rate had risen as high as 8% in 2009.

Pent-up demand could pull that rate even lower. According to Nareit, the normal rate of household formation is about 1.2% annually. But, with the sour economy in the last four years, the rate plunged to about 0.5%, as people delayed moving out and opted to live with roommates and parents longer. This has created an unmet demand of about 2 million households, “about three times what it has been in previous business cycles,”… See the whole article here