Despite the rising cost of land, labor and materials, more developers are finding the financing tools needed to build new affordable housing. “There is higher production in 2018 than 2017, thanks to a robust bond market—that has been driving a lot of activity,” says Peter Lawrence, director of public policy and government relations in the […]
A major Trump administration rewrite of the fair housing regulations that govern federal development grants is inching closer to completion. In late December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent Congress a proposed rule that would ask localities receiving federal housing funding to report on their housing market outcomes, and then propose […]
The $14.5-million sale of the Sand Cove Apartments in St. Pete Beach, Fla. last month isn’t a deal that would normally stand out amid the crowded field of mega-sales and portfolio acquisitions that occurred in 2019. What is eye-catching is that the sale price on the 72-unit property surpassed $200,000 per unit—the highest price paid […]
First, setting a price allows potential buyers to make a more meaningful comparison of your property to the competition. If your property is comparably priced, but has physical and locational characteristics that are superior to other available properties, potential buyers will be able to get a better sense of overall value. After all, whoever buys […]
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 […]
