Two people walk along water by palm trees and tall buildings in the background with a population graphic overlay

Shrinking Miami-Dade?

It’s surprising to read headlines about Miami-Dade County losing population from 2019 through 2022. “Miami Sees its First Population Drop in Decades,” the Wall Street Journal reported in August. “What’s the Matter with Miami?” read the headline of a piece by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Both reports blamed increasing housing prices as a [...]

Sun shines through the trees and Spanish Moss in the Withlacoochee Wetland in Green Swamp

Banking on Mitigation

In the Fall of 2018, Clay Thompson was living in Frankfort, Ky., when he got a call from an old Air Force buddy who was enjoying the good life in Florida. But his friend was having trouble obtaining a permit to build a backyard swimming pool at his home in Lutz, a fast-growing community north [...]

A graphic of many tall city buildings and the sky

Listed REITs and Private Property Investments

Debates erupted over the years whether listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) are a substitute for commercial property in a diversified portfolio. Institutional investors often include publicly traded REITs and privately held properties in their real estate allocation. Yet academic research suggests that though the private and public markets both exclusively own and operate commercial [...]

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Using AI to Review Construction Plans

City and county building officials are increasingly under pressure to expedite their reviews of development projects. But checking whether a proposed development or structure complies with numerous land development and building codes is a laborious process that may take short-staffed city and county building departments many weeks or even months to complete. What if, instead [...]

The U.S. Capitol building with dark clouds above

The Tax Man Cometh?

Real estate investors face a growing risk that taxes on capital gains could increase sharply as Congress looks to cut the ballooning $1.6 trillion U.S. budget deficit. Three factors make this risk especially great for real estate investors. First, is economic: The mounting deficit recently caused Fitch to downgrade U.S. debt from AAA to AA+, [...]

Water vapor view of Hurricane Ian on the Gulf Coast of Florida

One Year After Ian

Many Southwest Florida residents had an eerie feeling in late August when yet another major hurricane with a name beginning with “I” — Idalia — rapidly intensified and zeroed in on the western coast of the state. Was it déjà vu? Less than a year earlier, even mightier Hurricane Ian barreled ashore on a Lee [...]

Recent Findings

5.7 Did pandemic relief fraud inflate house prices? House prices in ZIP codes with high levels of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) fraud increased 5.7 percentage points more than ZIP codes with low fraud within the same county. The researchers from the University of Texas at Austin also found the probability a person receiving a suspicious [...]

Florida Consumer Sentiment: A Middling Mood

One way to view the outlook of Floridians is they are seeing a glass that’s half empty. But at least they’re not seeing an empty glass. That’s our takeaway of the latest survey gauging the sentiment of Florida consumers, which fell in September to an index of 66.3 (Figure 1). Despite a decline of nearly [...]

A man sits at a desk with a display, keyboard and open laptop

Work from Home

A surge of U.S. employees worked remotely since 2020 — full-time or by splitting time at their employer’s premises. But the most recent data shows an uptick in people returning to the office. Teleworking Responses of private sector businesses to a survey about whether and how often their employees telework. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor [...]

An aerial rendering of the Progress District in Alachua, Florida shows houses and businesses along a road and small, yellow airplane flying above

The Vision: The Progress District, Alachua, Florida

The Progress District is a mixed-use project being master planned by Concept Companies in collaboration with the Roberts Companies on 800 acres in Alachua, just north of Gainesville. The development includes Momentum Labs (center-right), which is slated to open next year with 55,000 square feet of collaborative laboratory space for science businesses. The building is [...]

Generated graphic of business people sanding by a wall of windows and silhouetted by the sunlight coming through the tall buildings outside

Outlook Falls but It’s Not All Bad

The outlook for the commercial real estate market weakened in the third quarter, but the news wasn’t all bad. Surveyed Bergstrom Real Estate Center advisory board members reported a few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy outlook as the market faced headwinds from increased interest rates and a tightened market for debt and equity capital. [...]

Spoken Here: Joe Brady, Brad Case and Chuck Davis

The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings real estate leaders to campus to speak with UF real estate students and faculty. Joe Brady’s career seems a neat progression of always stepping up the next rung of a real estate career ladder at big-name consumer-oriented companies, like T-Mobile and Walgreens. But there were steps down, [...]