Articles

Choppy floodwaters are up to the bottom of the windows of a home.

Flooding the Zone

Regulators and emergency officials are increasingly urging people to take flooding more seriously. Strengthen properties against flooding, don’t build in high-risk flood zones and buy flood insurance to protect your home. They argue not nearly enough homeowners buy flood insurance, especially in an era when climate scientists have documented rising sea levels and higher global [...]

Homes with palm trees and landscaping lining a curved street

Firearm Incidents and Housing Appreciation

Gun policies have been at the center of the country’s political debate for decades as incidents of mass shootings and violent crimes in schools have increasingly dominated news reports. Between 2014 and 2022, there were approximately 400,000 documented gun-related incidents nationwide, while Florida had 18,150 gun incidents, according to Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization [...]

A graphic of blue, purple and orange waves with a digital speck textures

AI on AI

In line with the conversation about artificial intelligence affecting every aspect of our lives, Due Diligence offers insight into its impact on the real estate industry. When covering the field of AI, why not have AI write a story about AI’s use in real estate. This is exactly what we did. Using AI is not [...]

Tall condos with palm trees and wispy clouds on a blue sky

Job Growth as an Indicator

Traditional real estate investment analysis often emphasizes population and household growth as primary indicators to gauge the demand for multifamily units in a given market. However, Rick Scarola, a UF Bergstrom Real Estate Center advisory board member, introduces a compelling alternative metric that leverages employment data to gauge market health. Scarola, a graduate of UF’s [...]

An aerial view of undeveloped land in Florida extending to the horizon

Thirty-Six-Million-Acre Balancing Act

Long ago, Mark Twain supposedly said, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” The witticism seems ever more apt today, particularly in Florida, where the state’s strong population growth and competition for land is drawing increased attention from academics, public officials and landowners. Researchers at the University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning inventoried [...]

A rendering of a reimagined University Place in Chapel Hill, NC shows businesses and people enjoying an outdoor area

The Rebirth of University Place

Ram Realty Advisors has entered the final stages of a $135 million project to reimagine a more than 50-year-old shopping mall in the heart of Chapel Hill, N.C. Begun in 2018, the extensive redevelopment has turned the mall inside-out by tearing down a third of the space and creating an open-air shopping center with 350,000 [...]

Florida Consumer Sentiment: Consumers Increasingly Upbeat

Florida consumers are more optimistic about the economy, according to the latest survey from the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR). Consumer sentiment among Floridians rose for the fourth consecutive month in September to 78.3 points, up 1.6 points from a revised figure of 76.7 in August (Figure 1). The numbers [...]

Recent Findings

-17.2% Price impact of climate risk on commercial real estate. Offices located near properties damaged by Hurricane Sandy saw a price penalty of 17.2% in the post-Sandy years 2012-2018 compared with similar unaffected ones without damaged properties nearby. The price effect persisted for four years post-Sandy. The price penalty was primarily driven by a decline [...]

Diving into Data Centers

A growing demand for IT infrastructure to support cloud computing and artificial intelligence is driving demand for data centers. Growth 19% Rents for hyperscale tech tenants in North America rose 19% in the first half of 2024 compared with a year earlier. $27.2B U.S. construction spending on data centers increased 69% to $27.2 billion in [...]

Workers on top of a tall condo as materials and supplies are brought up by crane in Hollywood Beach, FL

Florida’s New Condo Laws Recognize the Total Price of Living on the Beach

Nearly a million Florida condo owners face an important deadline at the end of the year. That’s when a law passed in 2022 requires most Florida condo associations to submit inspection reports for their buildings and to collect money from owners to pay for any needed repairs. Condo owners are reporting that new condominium rules [...]

Bergstrom Survey: Fall 2024

It is difficult to summarize market expectations over the past few quarters, based on our quarterly UF Bergstrom Real Estate Center outlook survey. Perhaps our best description is one of searching for direction. Some responses suggest that a trend is forming but others shift back and forth every quarter. We will start with one of [...]

Dirk Aulabaugh speaking to students in a Hough Hall classroom

Spoken Here: Dirk Aulabaugh

The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings real estate leaders to campus. Dirk Aulabaugh spoke Oct. 3 about lessons he has learned during his career at Green Street Advisors, where he is executive vice president and global head of advisory services. Aulabaugh and his Green Street colleagues advise publicly traded and private real estate [...]

A docked boat in a marina with a blue sky

A Tight Ship

The stiffest headwind most boaters face these days isn’t from a storm. It’s finding a place to tie up. Slips at marinas are so hard to find that Florida boat and yacht brokers advise clients not to buy a watercraft until they have first found somewhere to store it. “There’s just too many boats and [...]

Looking down a street in New York City from a high vantage point with tall buildings and orange clouds in the background

New York’s Local Law 97

New York City’s Green Energy Local Law 97 (LL97) is a significant component of the Climate Mobilization Act passed by the New York City Council in 2019. The New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability presents this law as “one of the most ambitious plans for reducing emissions in the nation.” One of [...]

A city skyline along water reflecting the buildings with graph lines overlaid on image

Predicting Property Returns

During times of market uncertainty — such as a financial crisis, pandemic or spike in interest rates — the illiquid nature of private equity real estate (PERE) leads to questionable valuations. Appraisals rely on recent transactions of comparable properties to estimate the most probable selling price for a property. But commercial property transactions typically drop [...]