How Office Development
Is Like Hillary Clinton

Back in those hard-to-remember 2000s, OC was the country's hub of the subprime lending industry. That collapsed, leaving a lot of vacant space, UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economic Jerry Nickelsburg explains. Fast forward to today: That space is being absorbed rapidly "because Orange County is growing once again--at a more rapid rate than the rest of the US,” he says. Jerry also says that developers surveyed by the UCLA Anderson Forecast look forward to the OC market tightening enough by 2016, with rents and occupancies up, to increase the amount of space available. (For Jerry's full video, see here.)

That sounds like a prospective wave of development in a few short years to us. (Pictured: the collaborative office space of 2020 isn't going to look quite like this.) Allen Matkins attorney Tony Natis adds that intelligent buyers are once again looking for office properties to buy (and there's no better sign of optimism than investors voting with their money). For more on the SoCal real estate market, see the Allen Matkins Minute below.

Anyone who predicted a Broncos victory knows forecasting is hard. So it's nice to know our sponsor Allen Matkins puts a lot of work into theirs, regularly interviewing developers to come up with its comprehensive Allen Matkins/UCLA Anderson Forecast Commercial Real Estate Survey. The results are very positive. John Tipton says the market has rebounded tremendously to a "good, strong, sustainable, active period." And Tony Natsis (above) notes that, compared to the mid-2000s, this run-up isn't fueled by "cheap abundant debt, with very bad underwriting." There's plenty more, so we recommend starting with this video. Then dig into the actual survey results here.

Recently Inman News tapped Auction.com EVP Rick Sharga as one of the 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders for the second consecutive year. So we tapped him for knowledge about multifamily. He tells us supply's going up in the OC apartment market--but it looks like demand is going to keep outrunning it. Although it's a buyer's market, he says homeownership rates will probably continue to decline in 2014, which suggests robust demand for rental units. That means "low vacancy rates and high rents even as new inventory hits the market.” (Rick is snapped with his daughter Jacquelyn during a vacation to Kauai.)