Transit Oriented Development | Ashworth Partners

Apartment investors and residents big winners in office building repurposing. – chart

In many top US markets the supply of office space has not just been stagnant, it’s actually been shrinking and apartment building investors have been the beneficiaries.

In a CoStar piece out today entitled Didn’t That Used to Be an Office Building? they list a couple big advantages of converting office space to apartments: Office working residents are close to work, and there’s great access to public transportation. How many people who spend hours a day sitting on the freeway would like the option to park the car all week?

If you combine the residential and mixed use portions of the chart below, 56% of the office conversions/demolitions are going to apartments:

An interesting fact Continue reading Apartment investors and residents big winners in office building repurposing. – chart

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?

The Yin/Yang of Apartment Building finance: Urban Equity v. Suburban Debt.

[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.

Urban Apartment Building Investments

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.”

Suburban Apartment Building Investment

“We’re in an interesting situation now, where anytime you have a Continue reading The Yin/Yang of Apartment Building finance: Urban Equity v. Suburban Debt.