Articles

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, [...]

A passenger train departs MiamiCentral on an elevated track with tall buildings all around

Now Boarding

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 [...]

An aerial view of a parking lot with many cars and only one empty parking spot

Parking Puzzle

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 [...]

A house under construction with a sold sign out front

State of Housing

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 [...]

Wynwood 25 apartment building in Miami

Playing Hardball

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 [...]

A pale yellow with light green trim art deco house in Miami with a for sale sign in front of it

Your ‘Local’ Housing Market: More National Than You Might Expect

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 [...]

Florida Consumer Sentiment: Mood of Consumers Ticks Up

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, [...]

Mapping the Change in Florida Property Value

The map shows the change in cumulative just value[1] of residential and commercial property by ZIP code from 2013-2022. Doesn’t include vacant land. Some ZIP codes omitted because of missing data. Values in Walton County’s 32459 tripled to $17 billion Values in Liberty County, which includes two ZIP codes, totaled $187 million in 2022 — [...]

The construction of Odyssey by Solutra in Fort Myers is a neighborhood of tightly spaced small homes for rent

Horizontal Apartments in Fort Myers: Odyssey by Solutra

Completed in the summer of 2022, Odyssey by Solutra in Fort Myers is the first of eight build-to-rent communities financed by Halstatt Real Estate Partners to meet a growing demand for detached rental units. Danville Leadbetter of Naples-based Soltura Development, Halstatt’s partner, said it’s taken some time to learn how to market these small rental [...]

A white home with an orange front door in Odyssey by Soltura

Going Horizontal in Southwest Florida

On May 8, 1923, the Florida Legislature created Collier County in honor of Barron Gift Collier Sr., who had amassed over 1 million acres in Southwest Florida and funded the construction of the Tamiami Trail to connect Tampa with Miami. Now 100 years later, his great granddaughter, Katie Sproul, is quietly carving her own path [...]

Painting of a cloudy sky with the sun trying to shine through creating some dramatic colors

Clouds with Some Sun

If Florida’s real estate industry is the weather, then our Bergstrom Real Estate Center survey is the local forecast. And while the newest forecast isn’t exactly sunny, the skies aren’t dark and there’s even some sun peeking out of the clouds. In the latest survey of advisory board members, nearly two-thirds of the respondents gauged [...]

Spoken Here: Brian Gale, David Kern, Todd Jones and Jim Heistand

The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings real estate leaders to campus to speak with UF real estate students and faculty. Brian Gale started his real estate career by going in the side door: he sold a copy machine to CBRE. Gale’s persistent salesmanship impressed the folks at the giant commercial real estate firm [...]

The letters ESG overlaid on an illustration of people doing various tasks and interacting with various objects

Keeping the ESG Score for Investors

Environmental regulations, societal expectations and political pressures are arguably impacting commercial real estate like never before. The Paris Accord international climate treaty and a 2019 New York law that regulates the energy efficiency of buildings are just two examples of how environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations are increasingly influencing the real estate market. Wall [...]