The prevailing sluggish employment growth notwithstanding, apartment rents are already rebounding at a surprisingly heady pace after an exceptionally slow construction period.
After a half decade of smallish pilot commercial programs, the retrofit financing structure known by the acronym PACE—for property-assessed clean energy—is becoming available to owners in several major markets, including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Read how it works, and the differing approaches being taken in different cities in implementing the program.
With a weak dollar boosting global demand for U.S. exports and the domestic economy inching back from the brink, the health of most U.S. industrial real estate markets is improving, too. Nonetheless, the national vacancy rate remains stubbornly in double-digit territory at 10.2 percent. Read what advice experts at Cushman & Wakefield and other firms have for savvy landlords with vacancies to fill.
New capital rules restricting bank holding companies’ investments into real estate (and other) funds may not be fully implemented until 2017. But it has already become clear to many observers that some of Wall Street’s household names are now playing smaller—and different—roles in the institutional real estate advisory arena than has been the case over the past couple of decades.
The expectation for the merged ProLogis and AMB is that the combined customer relationships, land banks, and financial resources will give it a leg up on a lot of its competition as it endeavors to expand its building portfolio. Read how analysts expect the firms’ respective geographic footprints to complement each other.
Demand for affordable housing tax credits is exceeding supply for the first time since the recession started digging in three years back, which bodes well for more affordable housing construction ahead. And it does not hurt that land, labor, materials, and capital costs are still largely well below where they were five years ago.
Whether revitalizing struggling communities or augmenting housing bases of high-cost neighborhoods, the winners of the 2010 Jack Kemp Workforce Housing Models of Excellence Awards are helping working-class families afford to live near employment centers. The winners are in Washington, D.C.; Denver; Newton, Massachusetts; and Baltimore.
Following leaders Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and the District of Columbia area, the most active 2010 apartment construction markets include Los Angeles, Tampa, Seattle, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, and Indianapolis. Construction lenders are now competing for deals in these and other promising markets as developers make plans for the post-recession economy.
It is hard to pinpoint how much of the $787 billion in federal economic stimulus funds is making its way into actual real estate developments, but projects adding value to real estate are under way, or on the way, in all four corners of the country—and many places in between. While the massive injection of taxpayer capital into the economy is not without its critics, it has prompted one of the biggest increases in construction spending the industry has experienced in a long time.
