For suburban Atlanta apartment owners, the baseball game still has a few innings left. For urban apartment owners? There may be a rain delay. Or so says RADCO's Peter Fitzgerald, one of the panelists at our 2016 Multifamily Forum, June 8, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.
When it comes to intown Atlanta's rent growth boom, Peter says: “I think that's over for a while. We're seeing that in the lending. They're not financing the projects.” For many developers, the plan was to build at a 7% cap and sell at a 6%. “You can't do a 7-cap anymore. So you're building to a 6[% cap] and trying to sell for a 5,” Peter adds. “I see projects that just haven't gotten off the ground. The numbers are just getting so thin.”
With top-line rents moderating in recent months in Atlanta, developers still have a plan for more than 12,500 units within the city limits, according to data from Haddow & Co. Peter says some developers may be over-betting the demand for $2/SF-plus rents as well, especially as young adults see more of their paychecks going to housing. “I would say a large percentages of the leases are guaranteed by the parents,” he says.
Of course, this may be some of Peter's sales pitch. After all, RADCO's focus has been on suburban garden-style apartment investing. The firm goes in, buys at a low basis, updates the property and hopes for the best. And that bet seems to be paying off, with double-digit rent growth in many instances, Peter says. He's really bullish because there's a lack of affordable housing. “You can get mileage out of these older properties.” Case in point: Ashford 75, a 416-unit apartment complex off Cobb Parkway in Smyrna, close to the new SunTrust Park project.
When RADCO bought it for $27M in 2014, “it was like 60% of the crime in Smyrna occurred in that complex,” he quips. They went in, evicted the problem tenants, pumped in up to $1,200 per unit, added better amenities and saw rents jump from $750/month to the high-$900s/month. Now they're adding granite countertops to units with the hopes of taking rents above $1,200/month, he says. “Now the whole demographic has changed where we're starting to get the young kids who know the Braves are going to be there in a year.”
Hear more from Peter, along with Integral's Vicki Lundy Wilbon, Columbia Residential's Noel Khalil, US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Ruben Brooks and AMLI Residential's Philip Tague (here) at our 2016 Multifamily Forum, 7:30 am, Wednesday, June 8, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. Register here.
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