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Austin’s appeal to a court ruling against its land development code rewrite process opened Nov. 17 with brief arguments from lawyers representing the city and the nearly two dozen property owners seeking to stop the revision.
Austin’s land development code covers what may be built in the city and where, and the rewrite process has now played out for nearly a decade without resolution. Some officials and housing advocates have pointed to the code, first laid out in the 1980s, as a barrier to expanding new and affordable housing options in Austin.
Both sides’ Nov. 17 arguments before a panel of three justices in the 14th Court of Appeals followed their previous comments at trial and from court filings.
Jane Webre, representing the city, stuck to Austin’s assertion that the homeowners’ rights to a notice of intention to rezoning and their ability to protest such actions should not come into play if every part of a city is rezoned. Click to read more at www.communityimpact.com.
SAN ANTONIO, November 19, 2021–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Institutional Property Advisors (IPA), a division of Marcus & Millichap (NYSE: MMI), announced today the sale of 10 multifamily assets totaling 2,290 units in San Antonio, Texas over 10 weeks. The properties sold for a total of $568.45 million.
“Market conditions for investors in pursuit of Class A multifamily assets in San Antonio are stronger than ever,” said Will Balthrope, IPA executive director. “Household formation in the booming Interstate 35 corridor is lowering vacancy, while single-family home prices surge, and the low inventory of homes for sale is boosting demand for top-quality apartments.” Construction in the metro declined this year to its lowest level since 2012, demand grew faster than supply, and availability decreased, paving the way for increased rent growth, according to Marcus & Millichap’s San Antonio Metro Area Research Report.
Balthrope and IPA’s Drew Garza represented the sellers and procured the buyers, consisting of real estate investment and pension funds, developers, private investment companies, local, national and global investors. “Our IPA team in San Antonio is generating over 20 property tours on each sale, which produces great competition and drives optimal pricing for our sellers,” added Garza. Click to read more at www.finance.yahoo.com.
The planned redevelopment of the Fair Market event venue at 1100-1108 E. Fifth St. can officially move forward, although the case has stoked debate about the affordable housing needs of rapidly changing East Austin.
Austin City Council on Nov. 4 gave final approval to the rezoning request for the project. On the drawing board is a six-story, 150,617-square-foot office building with ground-floor retail a couple of blocks east of I-35.
11E5 LLC and Endeavor Real Estate Group are the developers.
Right now, Fair Market is a 17,000-square-foot event venue that opened in 2014 and has been used for South by Southwest activations, Formula One events, weddings and more. Before Fair Market, the warehouse was home to Texas Office Products and Supply.
The rezoning request faced pushback from affordable housing advocates who bemoaned the lack of such housing on site. City staffers calculated if the 150,000 square feet was used for housing, it could result in 38 to 113 affordable housing units, based on the percentage of a hypothetical development dedicated to income-restricted units.
“On the surface this looks like a win but, in reality, it comes at the cost of the opportunity to build an additional 38 to 113 affordable housing units in the Saltillo [transit oriented development area], where we already have a plan in place to create affordable housing,” city staffers wrote in a density bonus comparison document. Click to read more at www.endeavor-re.com.
Developers have invested $16 Billion in the Dallas-Fort Worth apartment market so far this year, the most of any major metro in the country.
To meet the tremendous demand for new housing across much of Texas, developers have been adding tens of thousands of new apartments throughout the state’s major metros at a feverish pace. There has been so much construction activity, that just in the last 12 months, developers have completed over 52,500 apartments in the Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio markets, a new report from CBRE indicates. And by and large, these units are getting scooped up renters rather quickly.
The latest stats on the Texas multifamily market are substantial. To help illustrate how much new construction there has been in Texas, the report indicates that the top five markets for recent deliveries — which includes New York, Houston, Dallas, Washington, DC and Los Angeles — account for 27% of all the nation’s new apartments in the last 12 months. And while over 50,000 new apartments were built across the state’s largest metros in the last year, nearly 85,000 units were absorbed during this time.
Breaking it down by each market, the completion numbers are staggering. In the last 12 months, Houston has seen 15,600 new units added to its market, Dallas has had 13,600 new apartments delivered, Fort Worth saw 8,100 residences completed, Austin witnessed the completion of nearly 10,000 units and San Antonio had another 5,400 added to its total inventory.
But all of this new construction is coming at a cost. While the biggest cities in Texas have seen a steep increase in total supply of apartments in the last year, rental prices are also moving in a vertical direction.
According to the report, four of the highlighted cities have seen double-digit rent growth in the last 12 months. Austin rents have increased by an eye-watering 18% year-over-year according to CBRE, Dallas rent costs are up by 11.7%, San Antonio apartments are up 10.8% while Fort Worth rent prices have increased by 10%. El Paso rent growth is just under 10% while Houston’s stands at 8.5%.
The high absorption rates and quickly increasing rent prices have lured a lot of investment to Texas cities. The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex has actually led the nation year-to-date for the amount of dollars invested in new rentals: $16 billion. Developers have invested $7.38 billion in the Houston apartment market so far this year, while Austin has seen $5.16 billion invested in new development.
If you’re a recent transplant to Texas shell-shocked by the prices and competition for new rentals, you’re not alone. So long as Texas’s population growth and economy continue on an upward trajectory, there will likely be similar increases in new apartment deliveries, absorption and rent growth in the coming years.
After a week’s delay and extended deliberation on the dais, Austin City Council approved an updated version of the document setting the responsibilities for Project Connect’s development.
The joint powers agreement involves three Project Connect stakeholders: the city of Austin, Capital Metro, and the Austin Transit Partnership, or ATP. Sam Sargent, ATP director of strategy, said last week that the document represents the “rules of the rails” for the $7.1 billion transit expansion.
The three entities gathered last week at the Austin Convention Center to hammer out the final agreement but were forced to delay due to technical difficulties. Council took up its approval of the document, and several members’ revisions to the plan, Nov. 4.
In addition to detailing the roles of the ATP, Capital Metro and city officials and staff, portions of the document also tie to equity, land use and community engagement as the expansive transit project moves ahead. Several edits to the agreement approved by council this week also reflect commentary from residents and mobility groups that had previously expressed reservations. Click to read more at www.communityimpact.com.
Unless you’ve been living way off the grid the past couple of years, you’re fully aware that Austin ranks among the hottest residential real estate markets in the U.S. What you may not realize, though, is that it’s also among the country’s hottest commercial real estate markets.
In a recently released report, the National Association of Realtors identifies Austin as one of the top 10 commercial real estate markets in the U.S. San Antonio is the only other Texas market to appear on the unranked list.
Austin’s commercial real estate sector has benefited from an influx of companies, particularly in the tech industry, that are moving out of California. Among the relocating businesses are Cangshan Cutlery, F45 Training, Green Dot, and Markaaz.
Factors in Austin’s favor that the report outlines include:
Office occupancy has grown, rather than shrunk, in the past 12 months. Across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic has hammered the office sector, with millions of Americans telecommuting rather than heading to a workplace.
In the multifamily segment (part of the commercial real estate sector), Austin enjoys one of the most robust levels of construction activity in the country.
Advertised rents at multifamily properties are up 21.2 percent on a year-over-year basis. Click to read more at www.austin.culturemap.com
