Articles
Repurposing office buildings to housing has been one of real estate’s hottest topics in recent years. It’s little wonder. In the four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, vacancies in office buildings reached record levels and an increasing shortage of housing has plagued parts of the country. Consider two data points: 19.6% of [...]
This may be a good time to start noticing industrial outdoor storage (IOS) facilities, a tiny segment of the industrial sector dominated by small-to-midsize properties with fractured ownership and localized operations. It’s such a small part of the real estate business that you won’t find reliable aggregate returns and other market data to analyze. Instead, [...]
Florida consumers seem more optimistic than they’ve been in more than two years. Floridians’ overall sentiment increased 3.1 points to 72.6 in January from the previous month (Figure 1) — the highest level since September 2021, according to the latest survey from the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research (BEBR). Source: University [...]
$1.8B The effect of relaxing local regulations on federal rental assistance programs Researchers from the American Enterprise Institute and Bates White LLC simulated increasing housing supply on the cost of U.S. housing assistance programs in 11 metros. Increased construction from relaxing supply-constraining regulations for a decade would save $1.8 billion and increase the families served [...]
Mortgage rates more than doubled the past two years … 3% 6.8% Causing monthly mortgage payments to spike up across Florida … Average monthly principle and interest (P&I) for Florida median-priced home Yet the number of Florida homes sold held fairly steady … And the percentage of homes purchased with cash ticked up only in [...]
The Benoit Group leads the $40 million development of 143-unit affordable apartments on a recently demolished low-income housing property near downtown Birmingham, Ala. The 158,000-square-foot project is in the mixed-use redevelopment area known as Edgehill at Southtown. It aims to fill the needs for seniors 62 and older with one- and two-bedroom units. The four-story [...]
Some Florida real estate experts have called it the most significant state legislation to generate affordable housing in a generation and the first aimed specifically to address the critical need for “workforce” housing. The Live Local Act passed last year to encourage developers to build housing that more people can afford in a state where [...]
Over the past three years real estate professionals have ridden ups and downs through the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of fantastically low debt rates and a responding spike in interest rates that cooled the overheating economy. Going into 2024 it seems investors were left with two ways of viewing economic conditions: either “this is the [...]
The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings real estate leaders to campus to speak with UF real estate students and faculty. Walter Byrd is executive managing director at Transwestern, where he and his team help clients like delivery giant DHL locate and negotiate warehouse space. After graduating with a bachelor’s in psychology from UF, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]