Rentals on a roll
Developers built more than 10,500 apartments in South Florida over the past four quarters.
Developers completed more than 10,500 new apartments in South Florida over the past four quarters — the most in any one-year period since before the Great Recession, a new report shows.
The rental inventory doesn’t appear to be slowing, according to a second quarter analysis by the Berkadia real estate services firm. Construction has started on 68 properties that will bring more than18,500 units to the tri-county region by the end of 2019, the firm said.
“We’re still playing catch-up from the recession, when no new apartment product was built, which is why the volume of new deliveries hasn’t put much of a dent in occupancy or rental rates,” Mitch Sinberg, Berkadia’s senior managing director, said in a statement.
Berkadia said the average asking rent in the second quarter was $1,585, up from $1,573 a year earlier, though occupancy dipped to 94.8 percent from95.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016.
The rental market has been on a tear for the past several years. Former owners who lost homes during the housing meltdown are renting because they can’t qualify for mortgages, while young professionals are putting off buying because they prefer to remain mobile for job opportu-
nities, analysts say.
Jack McCabe, a housing analyst in Deerfield Beach, said the housing collapse and recession a decade ago changed the perception of renting.
“People who rented were thought of as secondclass citizens, but that all changed after the GreatRecession,” McCabe said. “People realized it was more cost-effective to rent. It’s much easier to get out of a lease than it is to sell a home.”
Many of the new rentals in South Florida are going up near public transit, Berkadia said. Brightline, the high-speed passenger rail service between West Palm Beach and Miami, is due to start in the fall.
Berkadia’s Charles Foschini said in a statement that “there’s a huge appetite among renters to live in an area where they can reach a large swath of South Florida without getting in a car, and forwardthinking developers are seizing the opportunity now to address that pentup demand.”
Berkadia is a joint venture of Berkshire Hathaway and Leucadia National Corp. The company is based in Ambler, Pa., and has South Florida offices in Miami and Boca Raton.
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