Market Intel

Some of the nation’s largest single-family homebuilders are seeking a new title: landlord. Residential real estate giants including D.R. Horton, Lennar Corp. and Toll Brothers are planning to use the massive scale they’ve built from decades of constructing homes for sale to jump into the fast-growing single-family rental home industry. The business has long been dominated by mom-and-pop investors with fewer than 10 homes in their portfolios, but lately it’s been drawing interest from institutional

The US median rent price rose 8.1% year-over-year and 3.2% month-over-month to a new high of $1,575 in June, according to the Realtor.com Monthly Rental Report. Forty-four of the 50 largest metros broke new records led by Riverside, Memphis, Tampa and Phoenix, which posted gains above 20% year-over-year. Riverside rents grew 24.3% from last year and 4.6% from May. Driving up rental prices was the shortage of affordable housing inventory, which forced more prospective homebuyers

Smart home tech isn’t just for Gen Zers and the younger crowd. Surprisingly, baby boomers are big on high-tech living spaces, too. According to data from Parks Associates, a market research and consulting firm, 14% of baby boomers—at least those living in multifamily units—own some sort of smart home device. Adoption of these devices is up 18 percentage points in the last five years among adults 65 to 74, and 9 points or more for

Earlier this year, a leading equity crowdfunding site conducted what’s believed to be the largest-ever survey of individual real estate investors in order to gauge their appetite for investing in a pandemic. Despite the economic volatility, nearly all of the 1,240 investors surveyed (96 percent) plan to add commercial real estate to their portfolios in 2021. Notably, a whopping 90 percent said they were likely to invest in multifamily. For comparison, less than half of

Several converging trends are contributing to an increase in the number of real estate developers transforming older office parks into competitive mixed-use properties, introducing multifamily housing to create communities that offer an appealing live-work environment. According to a report from the Urban Land Institute and PwC, Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2021, demand for rental housing in the suburbs will increase as more companies require, allow, or encourage working from home. This workplace shift, combined

According to Origin Investments, a Chicago-based private equity real estate firm, the seven multifamily markets in the United States best poised to capitalize on post-pandemic trends are: Phoenix; Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Tampa, Florida. Origin’s analyzed 150 markets to identify the cities with the highest chance of success as pandemic restrictions loosen. Origin has been refining this model for the past three years to inform its investment

Lauren Campos opened the door to her Phoenix apartment last week to find a note stuck in the door frame. Her rent was going up nearly $400 a month, the note said, a 33 percent increase. Campos and her fiancee read the letter in shock. The property management company gave them four days to decide whether to commit to stay or leave by the end of July. They spent the rest of the day poring

Innovative technology has been driving the multifamily housing industry forward in today’s market, particularly in the past year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several digital tools previously considered add-ons, such as virtual tours, ID scanning, and 3D imagery, became must-haves in the industry, which was forced to market apartments virtually to overcome pandemic-related restrictions. Leasing agents exercised an abundance of caution when showing apartments at the beginning of the pandemic, but, with COVID cases

Commercial real estate data company Yardi Matrix has updated its multifamily rent forecast for 2021, with Phoenix among several markets that received an upward revision in expected rental rate growth. Rents in the Valley are expected to grow by 8.7% — which is a 2.7% increase from the earlier prediction. That rate of growth is significantly stronger than the next two highest markets on the list: Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida (6.4%) and eastern Los Angeles County

A new deal by Lockwood Development Partners represents more than the purchase of nine hotels with plans to transform some of the properties into apartments. It accelerates an emerging push into hotel-to-apartment conversions across the country after the hospitality industry stagnated and the multifamily market reached record demand. The developer bought the hotels from different sellers with plans to convert some to multifamily housing. The company, which spent $225 million on the hotels that span