Build-for-Rent Portfolio in Texas Receives $15 Million in Financing via Walker & Dunlop

BETHESDA, Md., Nov. 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Walker & Dunlop, Inc. announced today that it structured $15,000,000 in financing for the Hamilton Park, Tully Trail, and Memory Village, a collection of build-for-rent neighborhoods located in Tyler, Texas.

Each of the build-for-rent (BFR) neighborhoods features contiguous, newly built single-family rental homes that are competitively priced. Each home is approximately 1,400 square feet, boasts three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and features fully maintained lawns and landscaping, a two-car garage, private fenced backyards, and open floorplans. Built between 1996 and 2021, the homes are in very high demand, with all 123 currently 100% occupied.

Stuart Wernick, SVP and Managing Director, and Drew Garrison, Director, led the Walker & Dunlop team in arranging the refinance for the sponsor, a regional custom home builder, a vertically integrated construction, development, and property management company. Utilizing their broad network of capital providers, the team partnered with a regional bank, which proved to be the most attractive lender for their client. The resulting financing was a non-recourse structured solution with a fixed rate in the low fours for a term of 30 years with flexible prepayment options. Click to read more at www.news-journal.com.

Black Friday 2021? Pandemic Still Slowing Holiday Sales

Black Friday? It wasn’t as busy as retailers might have hoped for this year, according to research from Sensormatic Solutions.

According to Sensormatic, visits to physical stores on Black Friday this year — the day after Thanksgiving — were down 28.3 percent when compared to 2019 levels. That’s an important comparison: Black Friday of 2019 was the last one before the COVID-19 pandemic became headline news.

In good news, though, Black Friday visits by shoppers this year were up a solid 47.5 percent when compared to 2020.

Sensormatic reported that shoppers might be more likely to visit stores in person this year because of the supply chain challenges that continue to hit the country.

“More shoppers felt comfortable visiting stores in person this Black Friday than in 2020,” said Brian Field, senior director of global retail consulting with Sensormatic Solutions, in a written statement. “One driver of this increased traffic could be ongoing supply chain challenges and shipping delays, which are resulting in consumers shopping earlier to ensure their gifts arrive on time.”

The rest of the 2021 holiday shopping season might be a strong one for physical retailers.

According to Sensormatic Solutions’ 2021 Holiday Consumer Sentiment Survey, 65 percent of U.S. consumers say they plan to shop in-store this holiday season for product-related reasons, like browsing for gift ideas or to see or touch products before buying.

Sensormatic Solutions predicts that the 10 busiest U.S. shopping days in 2021 will account for 40 percent of all holiday traffic. U.S. in-store traffic for this year’s holiday season is also expected to be down between 10% and 15% compared to 2019.

Governor Greg Abbott: Thousands of New Jobs to Come to Texas Through CBRE Group and Samsung

EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the world’s largest commercial real estate services investment firm, CBRE Group, will bring more than 1,000 jobs to two Texas cities.

CBRE Group will invest nearly 30 million dollars in its Dallas headquarters, creating 460 new jobs. With more than a 13 million dollar capital investment going towards an operations center in Richardson, Texas, the group aims to create 550 new jobs.

“Samsung had many other options for this project…this is the largest foreign investment in the state of Texas ever.”

GOV GREG ABBOTT
The Samsung facility will produce advanced microchips for mobile devices, 5G, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence (AI).

It is predicted that the creation of the Samsung facility in Taylor will create more than 2,000 technical jobs, thousands of indirect jobs, and at least 6,500 construction jobs. Construction of the facility will start early next year and production will start in 2024. Click to read more at www.fox44news.com.

Holiday Shopping & Beyond: What Texas Retail Experts See in Their Crystal Ball

The future has never looked brighter for retail development than it does heading into the 2021 holiday shopping season following nearly two years of, if not dark, then dim times.

“We are excited about what the extended holiday shopping season may mean for our retail tenants – especially coming off of a 2020 holiday season where in-store shopping was at worst limited and at best very inconvenient,” says Buck Cody, Principal at Endeavor Real Estate Group in Austin.

That created pent-up demand that Eric Lestin, Cushman & Wakefield’s Managing Director – Retail Lead, believes will yield a market benefit.

“Customers have been and continue to be anxious to shop and dine out and interact with others,” he says. “Many experts foresee retail sales growth to continue.”

The extension of the shopping season also has more significance this year due to supply chain restraints and overall availability concerns.

“While it is impossible to predict, or at some point understand whether or not more shopping days translates to more dollars spent, we are confident that as a general rule the more opportunities customers have to spend the better off our retail tenants will be,” Cody says. Click to read more at www.rednews.com.

Not Just Residential: Commercial Real Estate Is Booming, Too

The real estate market is hot in North Texas.

But it’s not just housing – experts say the frenzy we’re seeing in homebuying is happening in commercial real estate, too.

The demand is driving up costs from rent to construction.

“Prices are now at all-time highs,” said Chris Dharod, president of Dallas-based SSCP Management. “There’s a lot of money from other cities coming here because they want to own DFW real estate. For a long time, people wanted to buy California real estate. It’s now Texas real estate that they want to own.”

His company owns several shopping centers, apartment buildings and other real estate holdings, so Dharod has been able to observe the ever-changing market as the pandemic has unfolded over the last 18 months.

He said before COVID-19 disrupted the economy, the market was much more predictable and stable.

“At the start of the pandemic, a lot of businesses sort of slowed down and completely froze any growth that they were going through. They stopped building restaurants, they stopped moving offices, and building offices,” he said. “Since then, companies in most industries have picked back up and prices are now at all-time highs.” Click to read more at www.nbcdfw.com.

Office Market Rebound: NAIOP Projects Strong Return to Positive Net Absorption of Office Space in 2021, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A demand forecast by the NAIOP Research Foundation is projecting a strong resurgence of the U.S. office commercial real estate market through 2023.

As the unemployment rate declines, more workers return to the office and the economy continues to improve, the office space net absorption forecast has been revised upward from 1.8 million square feet to 8.3 million square feet in Q4 2021. The total net absorption in 2022 is forecast to be 53.5 million square feet with a quarterly average of 13.4 million square feet. In 2023, the projected net absorption is 34.3 million square feet during the first three quarters, with a quarterly average of 11.4 million square feet.

This forecast is dependent on continued economic growth, which seems plausible given recent data. The measured unemployment rate in September was 4.8%, down from 6.1% in April. Supply chain issues have resulted in higher consumer prices and stoked inflationary concerns. Still, real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose at an annualized rate of 2.0% in Q3 2021, a pace that cooled from the Q2 2021 real GDP growth rate of 6.7%

According to the report, “although the number of people currently employed in professional and business services, financial activities and information industries is only 1.5% lower than in February 2020, office utilization rates remain much lower than before the pandemic due to continued concerns about coronavirus transmission. Click to read more at www.naiop.org.