- Blackstone Bets on Campus Housing with $13 Billion Acquisition “Blackstone Inc. agreed to buy student-housing owner American Campus Communities Inc. in a deal valuing the company at about $12.8 billion, including debt, a bet that rents will continue to rise as more college students return to campus. Austin, Texas-based ACC is the largest publicly traded owner and developer of student housing in the U.S. The deal marks Blackstone’s single biggest foray into the sector to date. Rent collections in student housing remained high throughout the pandemic, despite an extended stretch in 2020 when many students attended classes remotely while spending time off campus.” (The Wall Street Journal)
- Climate Change Risks Get the Attention of Real Estate Investors “In Charleston, S.C., climate change is becoming impossible to ignore. In the historic city center, “sunny day” flooding occurs roughly once a week, making downtown difficult to traverse. Groundwater has begun to burble up in spots. And after a downpour, much of the region is susceptible to flooding. City officials are aware of the vulnerability, and they’re pondering big initiatives, like a partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers to build a $1.1 billion sea wall and a pioneering zoning law that would prohibit development in the city’s lowest areas.” (The New York Times)
- YIMBY Movement Goes Mainstream in Response to High Housing Costs “A special election Tuesday for a state Assembly seat in San Francisco is largely centered around an increasingly potent issue in California: Which candidate wants to build more housing. The race between two Democrats who describe themselves as progressives has become something of a referendum on the YIMBY movement, short for ‘yes in my backyard.’ YIMBY grew in opposition to the activists that critics have labeled NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” who oppose new construction. YIMBYs say that the best way to tackle rising home prices and homelessness in states such as California is to make it easier to build housing of all types, from luxury condominiums to duplexes to government-subsidized units.” (The Wall Street Journal)
- Renters Are Growing Pessimistic They Will Ever Own a Home as Prices Keep Rising “Faced with a white-hot real estate market, renters are losing confidence they will ever own a home. On average only 43.3% of renters expect to own a home at some point in the future, down sharply from 51.6% in 2021, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released on Monday. That's the lowest level since the NY Fed began asking the question in 2015. High prices appear to be a driving factor: Twenty-two percent of households in the survey report they planned to buy a home but now view renting as a better financial decision.” (CNN Business)
- What New York Real Estate Investors Are Most Concerned About Right Now “With all that is going on in the world today and all that is going on in New York City, I thought it would be interesting to hear what was on the minds of those in the New York investment sales market. Toward the start of this month, I emailed a wide array of investors, asking them one simple question: What is the issue that concerns you the most about our local commercial real estate market today? There were 847 responses, and here are the results in the order of the most mentioned issues.” (Commercial Observer)
- Health Care Real Estate’s Positive Prognosis “In 2021, investors responding to the survey allocated $10.9 billion to health-care real estate, yet actually invested nearly $16 billion. Similar allocations from those companies this year total $17.1 billion, leading CBRE to estimate that a minimum of about $25 billion in equity will be deployed into the health-care sector this year.” (Commercial Property Executive)
- Green Street’s Cedrik Lachance on ‘the Real Story of Office’ Right Now “Work, dining, shopping and travel habits — the last couple of years disrupted each one and speeded up changes in the industries that invest in and service them. One of the people paid to crunch the numbers on these commercial real estate disruptions is Cedrik Lachance, the director of research for Green Street Advisors, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based research firm analyzing more than 130 real estate investment trusts (REITs), all the big ones and many of the not-so-big ones, to see which trends are overhyped and which are underappreciated. Fortunes could ride on the answers.” (Commercial Observer)
- Better.com Announces More Layoffs, Citing Mortgage Market Turbulence. “The mortgage lender Better.com announced another round of layoffs on Tuesday after cutting roughly 900 people late last year in a mass firing over Zoom that drew swift backlash. Better.com was one of the pandemic’s early business winners, quadrupling in size when mortgage rates were low — but it has become better known for bungling its approach to downsizing. The company spurred an outcry for firing 900 workers on Zoom in December, and again in March, when roughly 3,000 employees were laid off.” (The New York Times)
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