Articles
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 [...]
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+, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
Brightline, originally known as All Aboard Florida, is a fast-speed passenger rail service developed by a company that traces its roots to industrialist Henry Flagler, who built a pioneering railway along Florida’s eastern coast more than a century ago. Now it appears the new railroad is giving a lift to not only increasing numbers of [...]
Roughly a century ago, as car ownership boomed and the automobile reshaped America, cities discovered they had a problem. Where to park all the cars? “American cities are faced with an extreme shortage of automobile parking spaces,” bemoaned a 1952 U.S. traffic engineering study entitled “Zoning and Traffic.” Happily, the authors reported, cities had found [...]
After a long and steady period of robust growth following the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, the U.S. housing market is searching for a new identity. A whirlwind of economic events spurred by fast-changing U.S. monetary policy, war in Ukraine and sharply rising inflation has jolted the housing market. As the supply of houses has [...]
Business sectors use many terms to describe a situation that suddenly gets tough for consumers. It’s a “seller’s market” in real estate and a “bear market” on Wall Street. In the insurance industry, it’s called a “hard market.” But Florida businesses hunting for coverage these days may use even starker terms — like harsh or [...]
For those working in real estate, it can seem as though each state’s housing market operates independently, disconnected from other markets and even the national economy. After all, everyone knows that real estate is a local market, and its three most important features are “location,” “location” and “location.” Today’s housing market seems the perfect example [...]
While not outrageously positive, the mood of Florida consumers has rebounded from a trough last summer when a spike in inflation rocked the economy, according to the most recent surveys from the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR). The economic outlook of Floridians increased in May to an index of 68.8, [...]