When Ronnie Martin graduated from high school in Murfreesboro in 1992, the small city in central Tennessee had "the charm of a sleepy town."
No longer: In the past 30 years, Murfreesboro has exploded in population, growing 20% in just the last five years.
US rents up 12.6% year over year in January, marking annual rent growth’s 10th consecutive record high.
Single-family rents continue to set record increases in growth.
Rent growth in this asset class increased 12.6% in January 2022, the fastest year-over-year increase in over 16 years, according to the CoreLogic Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI).
Rental communities are going from vertical to horizontal.
House hunters are attracted to the hassle-free living and lack of down payments, but there’s a trade-off: They give up the investment of owning a home.
One analyst said the industry is “like a tidal wave that is just about to crash on the beaches of Florida.”
Florida has long been home to the sprawl of suburbia — the landscapes of near-identical houses with emerald lawns are as quintessential to the state as its reptile-filled swamps.
Sometimes a small niche is growing so rapidly and becoming so important that it cannot be ignored. Whether you choose to abbreviate it BFR, B2R, or choose from a host of other iterations, the “build-to-rent” niche comprises only 5% of homes built, but it is growing rapidly and highlighting some important emerging trends in housing demand.
Simply put, instead of opting for a standard apartment unit, some renters incline toward more of a single-family residential experience with the benefit of a professionally-managed and amenitized community. One fast-growing developer in this niche, NexMetro, markets their Avilla brand as “Rents like an Apartment. Lives like a home.”
A different sort of American dream is under construction outside Denver. More than 130 homes are being framed and nail-gunned together. But there won't be any real estate agents staging open houses. Instead of homeownership, this development is all about home-rentership.
"We got started in around 2010 after the housing crash and people were losing their homes," says Josh Hartmann, the CEO of NexMetro Communities, the company building these homes.
He says the business idea was that all those families losing homes to foreclosure wouldn't want to go back to renting apartments. They'd want to rent single-family houses until they got back on their feet financially.
...more articles are available on the NexMetro website.