How HTG Is Bucking The Luxury Trend

In an age of high-rise—and high rent—apartments and condos springing up all over the Florida coast, one area developer is going against the grain with a pipeline of affordable housing.

We chatted with Housing Trust Group president Matt Rieger just as his firm finished up Whispering Palms Apartments, where among its 63 units are a handful that are geared toward needier families in the Largo area.

Matt says that's among four new development deals in Florida, all targeting a mix of market-rate and affordable income housing units, including Valencia Grove Apartments, a 144-unit project in Lake County and Wagner Creek Apartments (below), a 73-unit mixed-income project in Miami. He says the majority of the company's interest is low-income housing right now.

His firm captures a blend of debt and low-income housing loans from various Florida housing authorities. And if you think four active development projects is busy enough, HTG's pipeline of area developments is near a dozen projects and more than 1,300 units over the next year, which rates at about a deal a month, Matt says.

“That's probably as full a pipeline of any affordable housing developer in America,” he says. “We cannot build affordable housing in the Miami-Dade County area...fast enough for the demand.”

That's quite a change from the Great Recession, when Florida's economy took a wallop. Rents then dropped as companies laid off workers, with a two-bedroom averaging about $1,500/month at the depth, according to Rent Jungle stats.

Today? Miami has the fourth-highest average apartment rents of any city in America at $2,700/month, eclipsed only by DC, NY and San Francisco. And as of last year, Miami had the second-highest apartment rent growth in the nation, behind Vancouver, WA, at 9.3%, according to Apartment List stats.

“If you would have said to me 10, 15, 20 years ago that Downtown Miami would see million-dollar condo units, I would have said you were crazy. Now there's a ton of them,” Matt says, here with AM Affordable Housing's Alonzo Mourning (also an former Miami Heat and NBA Hall of Famer) and HTG chairman Randy Rieger during the groundbreaking for its Courtside Family Apartments affordable project in Overtown.

But that is pricing the average Floridian out of ownership and pushing more into the rental world. “That's just indicative of a thriving, growing city.”