News
SF Multifamily's Roman Empire
November 15, 2012
| When it comes to apartments, all roads lead to the Bay Area. (Just try to give your relatives those directions when they come for Thanksgiving). Some 250 of you joined us at the St. Regis forBisnow's second annual San Francisco Multifamily Summit, where our second panel took a look at the development and owner side of the equation. |
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| Our moderator, Allen Matkins partner Lee Gotshall-Maxon. As a real estate transactional and development attorney, he's worked on 25 multi-unit and condo projects over the past several years and 6,500 units of ground-up development over the past 15 years. He ran a lively discussion touching on whether multifamily?s strength will continue, the extent to which Baby Boomers impact this market, and whether developers can deliver urban services in the suburban markets. |
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| Stellar Management CEO (and even more stellar dresser) Robert Rosania sees no ebb in multifamily investment demand in the US, but where will it flow? The early part of it will be much more urbanized, ?but as those yields shrink, and clearly they have, people will start to chase the secondary and tertiary markets.? From a demand perspective, the young kids today don't want to own: They want to be in an urban market and a hip place to live. The urbanized demand pool wants services, and they don't get services in a single-family home. ?If you want services, you're more likely to be a renter or a buyer in a very high-end, full-service ownership building.? |
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| MacFarlane Partners president Greg Vilkin said Gen Y is much more mobile than the Baby Boomers (just watch them play pickup basketball against each other). They'll live in two countries and have three different locations during their career. ?That mobility means that you want the ability to plug and play, not necessarily be tied to an asset.? Traditional single-family home ownership is going to be a smaller and smaller market. In addition, Greg noted the millennials as well as the Boomers want everything customized, to have it their way. He calls it the Starbucks effect (half-caf, extra hot, double shot). The successful projects are the non-commoditized product. ?They have a point of view all the way through, from the outside to the service package.? |
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| Sares Regis Group chief development officer Todd Regonini(showing us the perfect size for a candy bar) said the cohort of people aged 18 to 30 are 80 million strong and just entering the rental age. ?They're the new hires at all these tech firms.? While the numbers bode well for multifamily, the key is to have good jobs that support people forming households and living in these high-priced apartments that developers are building. According to Todd, the transit-oriented link node is the future of the Peninsula. There's an urbanization happening within our suburbs around these nodes where the services are following. It's densifying, and it's going to put people in proximity to work, transportation, and a real neighborhood. |
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| As a New Yorker, Robert said he's envious of the Bay Area?s economic position. ?You have the least levered, most productive employment society in America, period.? There's both a blessing and a curse to having an enormously efficient workforce—the area's gross employment is off 15% to 18% from 2000. That said, the only things that can hurt the Bay Area are state-wide taxation policies that drive out companies. Greg, on the other hand, said it's an information-based economy and ?we are sitting at Rome? because this is the epicenter. ?The mothership is still going to be here.? (We agree, but only overnight AM radio hosts believe us.) |
