Articles

Recent Findings

$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 [...]

Florida Housing Market Weathers Storm of Higher Interest Rates

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 [...]

Southtown Senior development in Birmingham, Alabama

Building in Birmingham

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 [...]

Live Local Act

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 [...]

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Bergstrom Survey: Spring 2024

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 [...]

Spoken Here: Walter Byrd, Samir Yajnik and Eddy Benoit

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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]