If it appears that apartments are going up on every street corner in Dallas, well, they are. The Dallas-Fort Worth are is going to be the nation’s top apartment leasing market over the next three years, according to a new report by the folks at Jones Lang LaSalle.
Perhaps you, like me, see the cranes and scaffolding and think, gee we need them now but by the time they are completed…maybe there will be no more renters?
No worries: Jones Lang LaSalle researchers predict there will be enough renter demand — too much, in fact, so that the new supply still won’t keep up with the increased demand. The bulk of the rental units are going up in central Dallas, Lewisville, Las Colinas, the Allen-McKinney area, North Fort Worth and Denton, this according to MPF Research reports.
You see, as Steve Brown pointed out today,
“D-FW, Houston, Atlanta and Phoenix are ranked as the top net leasing markets for apartments through 2017, in the new report.”
It’s all about job growth, which spurs household growth, the guys at JLL told Steve. But they also said that this may be a shocker to the tech-heavy regions — that more jobs and people to lease all these units may be headed our way than to, say, the Bay area.
I was just in San Francisco this weekend, and have never seen such a dearth of apartment housing. Though construction is in progress, it will never keep up with demand. In Palo Alto, Stanford University owns mega land and housing. Young people are desperately looking for affordable apartments, but they are getting $3096 average rents in San Francisco, and a whopping $2128 in Santa Clara County, San Jose, the mecca of high-tech jobs with Google, Paypal, and hundreds of start-ups. Many kids live in group houses, or reverse-commute to San Francisco. Compare that to $862, the average rent for Dallas Fort Worth. But many higher-end and luxury apartments in Dallas are charging closer to the $2000 mark, and getting it!
Steve says about 25,000 apartments are under construction in North Texas – more than any other U.S. metropolitan area. We are a leader in job growth, like Houston and Austin. So I guess those cranes and scaffolds are here to stay.
In Steve’s report, he also said Jones Lang LaSalle has christened the D-FW area as one of the country’s top apartment investment markets: $5.6 billion in sales last year. Guess who saw more apartment sales volume than us: New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.
Guess that explains why the new CEO of Belks, Salem Boohaker, wants to lease in Uptown. That place is so hot if it had a river, I swear they’d find some landfill, fill it, and just keep on building.
