Colliers has been named the exclusive retail leasing team for Howard Hughes Holdings Inc. in The Woodlands and Bridgeland master-planned communities in Houston.

The assignment encompasses 11 properties totaling 410,000 square feet in The Woodlands and Bridgeland, along with future pre-development opportunities on 725 and 1,055 developable acres, respectively.

The Colliers team includes Hannah (Tosch) Schiro, Wade Greene, Kim Lenardson, Adriana Shaw and Kaylee Boyd.

The assignment includes premier retail locations throughout The Woodlands, such as Hughes Landing®, The Woodlands Waterway® and Creekside Park® West. In Bridgeland, the team will oversee the retail leasing for Parkland Village®, the initial phase of Bridgeland’s urban core —Village Green at Bridgeland Central® —as well as all future phases of the emerging 925-acre urban district, Bridgeland Central.

 JLL Capital Markets completed the sale of a nine-property, 5,180-unit self-storage portfolio in Midland and Odessa, Texas.

JLL represented the seller, Extra Space Storage, and procured the buyer, AVAD Capital.

The institutional-quality portfolio totals 782,998 rentable square feet in best-in-class assets strategically located throughout Midland and Odessa. The assets are positioned in the Permian Basin, the highest producing oil field in the U.S., generating a thriving and affluent community with outsized self-storage demand.

JLL’s Capital Markets Investment Sales and Advisory team representing the seller was led by Senior Managing Directors Steve Mellon and Brian Somoza and Directors Adam Roossien and Matthew Wheeler.

Dalfen Industrial has bolstered its holdings with the off-market acquisition of a premier industrial property strategically positioned just 3 miles south of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Situated in the coveted GSW industrial submarket, this last-mile logistics hub offers unparalleled connectivity with immediate access to State Highways 360, 161, and 183—solidifying its status as a key asset in one of the metroplex’s top industrial locations. The notoriety of this location is evidenced by the neighboring tenants including Cardinal Health, Amcor Ridge Plastics, Expeditors and Refresco Group.

This 130,000-square-foot cross-dock facility, built in 2016, distinguishes itself as a state-of-the-art asset in a submarket largely comprised of older, less modern buildings. With an average building vintage of 1999 and typical clear heights of approximately 25 feet, this facility offers a significant competitive advantage with its modern attributes including 32-foot clear heights, trailer parking and 130-185’ truck courts.

With this acquisition, Dalfen Industrial owns and operates 12.6 million square feet across Texas.

A sure sign that the student housing market remains strong? A new study shows that the number of college students preleasing space at student housing across the nation continues to rise.

According to the most recent numbers from Yardi Matrix, as of December 2024, preleasing across the Yardi® 200 schools — the major U.S. colleges and universities that Yardi Matrix tracks — reached 47.1%. That’s an increase from the preleasing volume of 39.7% as of the same month in December of 2023.

That’s good news for the student housing sector. But the Yardi Matrix report does point to some less positive signs in the market.

For instance, the pace of rent growth on a year-over-year basis was well behind the last two years’ pace, according to the latest Yardi Matrix National Student Housing Report. 

According to Yardi Matrix’s numbers, 55 schools had preleased 50% of their student housing as of December, with 14 hitting the 75% mark. By contrast, 42 schools were less than 25% preleased in December.

The average advertised rent per bedroom climbed to $909 a month in December. If that sounds high, it’s because it is: This ranks as the highest average student housing rent ever recorded.

That being said, monthly rents are not growing as quickly as they once were. According to Yardi Matrix, Rents inched up 1.5 percent in the first three months of the leasing season, following 4..6% growth during the previous year. The top 10 markets for rent growth averaged a preleasing rate of 56.3%, while the 10 markets with the largest declines average 32.8% preleased that month.

Rent growth for the Yardi 200 stood at 3.8% on a year-over-year basis in December and has averaged 4.3% since October, something that Yardi Matrix attributes to operators being more conservative pushing rents.

Rent growth in markets with four or more properties has ranged from -17.7% at UC Berkeley, which has been inundated with new supply, to 14.4% at Auburn University.

The new supply of dedicated student housing properties has been dropping. Last year, the number of new beds totaled 35,703. In 2023 developers brought a higher total of 44,746 beds online.

During the fourth quarter of last year, 28 student housing properties changed hands, bringing 2024’s total number of transactions to 129, exceeding by 50 the total deal volume recorded in 2023. That number is also above the pre-pandemic averages of 2021 and 2022.

Yardi Matrix reported that the sales prices of student housing properties also surged in 2024, reaching more than $101,000 a bedroom.

The country’s single-tenant net-lease market ended 2024 with a burst of activity, wrapping the year with solid growth in the fourth quarter.

That’s the good news from Northmarq‘s fourth quarter 2024 single-tenant market snapshot.

According to Northmarq’s report, the single-tenant net-lease market saw $13.8 billion in sales in the fourth quarter across the country. That’s a jump of 57.6% from the same quarter a year earlier. It’s also an increase of 19.4% from the third quarter of 2024.

In its report, Northmarq said that this flurry of year-end activity is a positive sign for 2025. The increase in sales could represent a resurgence of confidence in this market sector, Northmarq said.

In especially good news for a struggling sector, Northmarq reported sales transaction volume in the single-tenant net-lease office sector rose 36.4% in the fourth quarter when compared to the third quarter of last year.

Another interesting statistic? Private investors continue to dominate buyer activity in single-tenant net-lease properties, with Northmarq reporting that they made up 42% of the buyer pool during 2024.

Northmarq reported, too, that cap rates have climbed steadily for nine consecutive quarters and averaged 6.78% as of the end of the fourth quarter. That’s an increase of nine basis points from the third quarter of last year.

When compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, though, cap rates in this sector have jumped 51%.

It’s true that converting office space to multifamily buildings is no easy task. But such conversions offer an opportunity for cities to remove outdated or obsolete office space and replace it with highly desirable rental housing.

This truth explains the prediction from RentCafe that the number of office-to-apartment conversions will soar across the United States in 2025.

In its Market Insights report published Jan. 30, RentCafe said estimates that the number of apartments set to be converted from office spaces in the United States will jump to a record-breaking 70,700 in 2025.

That’s up significantly from the 23,100 office-to-apartment conversions that the country saw in 2022.

RentCafe reported, too, that office conversions make up almost 42% of the nearly 169,000 apartments expected to result from future adaptive reuse projects.

You might think that only older office buildings are slated for multifamily conversions. That’s not entirely true. While most conversions do involve older properties, RentCafe reported that the adaptive reuse of office buildings built between the 1990s and 2010s is on the rise, jumping from 1.27% of past office-to-apartment conversions to a projected 7% of future projects.

The reasons behind the increase in office conversions aren’t complicated. The United States has a severe shortage of housing units. At the same time, the work-from-home movement means that a growing amount of office space is sitting vacant today, especially space in older properties that lack the amenities sought by today’s tenants.

One solution to both eliminate vacant office space and boost a community’s housing supply is to convert obsolete office space into multifamily properties.

Conversions, though, do bring challenges. The biggest? Most office spaces, even obsolete ones, aren’t good candidates for conversion to apartment properties. An office building needs to sit in the right location, preferably a walkable neighborhood close to public transportation, restaurants and shops.

The building itself must lend itself to conversion, too. If developers have to make too many changes to the property, the cost of conversion won’t make financial sense.

RentCafe reported that the number of future apartments resulting from office conversions has been on the rise since 2022. Back then, office conversions were expected to result in 23,100 new apartments. That number rose to 45,200 in 2023 and 55,300 in 2024, before hitting a projected record-setting 70,700 this year.

According to RentCafe’s report, more than 1.2 billion square feet of office space — equal to 14.8% of total office inventory — is considered suitable for conversion.

The office-to-apartment pipeline is strongest in New York City, with 8,310 future apartments expected to result from office conversions in 2025. Chicago leads the Midwest, with 3,606 future apartments projected from office conversions as of this year.

Dallas ranks high, too, with RentCafe reporting that the metropolitan area’s office-to-apartment pipeline stands at 2,725 units as of 2025. Minneapolis ranked seventh on RentCafe’s list, with an office-to-apartment pipeline of 1,873 units as of 2025.

Other area cities ranking high on RentCafe’s list include ninth-place Cincinnati, with an office-to-apartment pipeline of 1,753 units; 10th-place Kansas City, Missouri, 1,676 units; 12th-place Cleveland, 1,619; and 16th-place Omaha, 1,294.