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, [...]

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 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 [...]

Not Dead Yet: Reinventing Shopping Malls

In the summer of 2017, the mall in Marshall, Texas, appeared to be on life support. JCPenney, its last remaining flagship store, closed and only seven retail tenants remained in what threatened to become a cavernous shell. “East Texas shoppers are coming to terms with the fact that this could spell the end for the [...]

Looking skyward at the base of three tall buildings

Outlook for 2023

The past year was one of change. It is time to take stock of where we ended and what to anticipate in 2023. As a backdrop to our real estate survey, 2022 brought significant relief to the pandemic concerns, and a let down from the dramatically high residential performance of 2021. We also saw the [...]

Spoken Here: Daniel O’Keefe and Andy Hogshead

The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings prominent real estate professionals to campus to speak and interact with UF real estate students and faculty. Daniel O’Keefe (BSBA ’90, JD ’95) is co-managing partner of the Orlando office of Shutts & Bowen LLP, one of oldest law firms in Florida. He handles real estate, land [...]

A triplex home in Minneapolis

Some Communities Take on Single-Family Zoning in Hopes of Spurring More Housing

A triplex built by Minneapolis homebuilder Bruce Brunner following the city’s adopting a new comprehensive plan that eliminated single-family-only neighborhoods. Just before midnight on a Thursday in August, Gainesville’s City Commission dismantled a nearly century-old cornerstone of municipal planning efforts: single-family zoning. A divided commission voted to allow duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes on land that [...]

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Partly Cloudy: Outlook of Real Estate Industry Leaders

Surveyed real estate industry leaders saw the skies turn gray in the most recent quarter, a period marked by rising interest rates, increasing costs and a slowing economy. The third quarter of 2022 marked the third consecutive period that the Bergstrom Real Estate Outlook Index showed a decline, and it’s the lowest rating since October [...]

Spoken Here

The Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series brings prominent real estate professionals to campus to speak and interact with UF real estate students and faculty. Chris Corr Chris Corr shared highlights of his more than 30 years in the real estate industry, including playing a leadership role in developing Disney’s Celebration, Florida and numerous other [...]

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Member Perspectives: August 2022

Bergstrom Survey – Early 2022 Perhaps 2022 will be the year that our market perceptions stabilize. Following a wildly uncertain 2020 and a surprisingly high-growth 2021, our survey is showing some signs of balance. We will discover over the course of the year if this is the beginning of a return to normalcy or a [...]