Commercial real estate (CRE) has long been used by institutional and high net worth investors to diversify their portfolios. Meanwhile, retail investors are searching – often unsatisfactorily – for income and diversification. The global quest for yield is driving a long-term shift from conventional investments to alternative assets. As interest in alternative investments grows, private […]
You probably never really thought of the storage industry as being a leader in environmentalism. However, the self-storage industry has focused on environmentally friendly initiatives for a while now. Colleen Quinn, an author at Apartment Therapy published an article on eco-friendly storage back in 2008. She talked about a lot of changes that the industry […]
Banks provide more than $100 billion in capital each year to low and moderate-income communities as part of their Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) investing requirements. Increasingly, they are focusing those dollars on supporting affordable housing projects. “As a regulated institution, we are required for CRA purposes to make these types of community development investments, but […]
Bridge financing is short-term financing, sometimes referred to as private money or hard money. Bridge loans are typically made by private individuals and not banks, so the interest rates on bridge loans are higher than bank loans. The year saw record origination volumes from life insurance companies and the GSEs, and the second highest level […]
As fears of a possible recession and overbuilding in the multifamily sector diminish, lenders are showing they still have an appetite for financing construction projects. The availability of mezzanine loans and lower interest rates are helping fuel this activity and helping to offset rising construction costs. Even if the economy shrinks sometime in 2020 or […]
Despite all the public concern over the affordable housing crisis, and an alphabet soup of ballot and bond measures in recent years intended to address it, San Francisco has achieved limited concrete results. In September, the San Francisco Planning Department updated its “development pipeline”, which showed more than 2,000 individual development projects with some 73,502 new units […]
The self-storage industry has been experiencing declining street rates in recent times, but there remains an enthusiasm for building storage facilities. With investors still seeing the industry as a good and stable option, it is therefore not surprising that in some parts of the country there are many self-storage projects in the pipeline, either in the construction or the planning […]
2020 is upon us! My wife and I joke the time between Labor Day and year’s end just flies by — aided of course by Christmas decorations festooning the stores before Halloween. But I digress. By all accounts, 2019 was an amazing year! As the year dawned, I was a bit concerned about the trade […]
As a 20+ year resident of Arlington and an affordable housing developer, I am often asked by neighbors, “What does affordable housing mean?” often followed by, “How can we help?” In stark terms, here’s an example of the “affordable”* housing situation. The average apartment rent in Arlington in 2018 was $1,918 per month.* Yet a […]
Affordable housing has become a crisis on the West Coast, due in large part to the expansion of the tech industry. Recently, the tech giants that helped create the problem have pledged money and support to seek fixes in their communities, but there's plenty of reason for skepticism. Liz González, a contributor at Silicon Valley […]
