Urban Life

Show Only ...
Maps - Photos - Videos

How Many Homes Do Corporate Landlords Really Own? – The New York Times

|

How Many Homes Do Corporate Landlords Really Own? – The New York Times

While real estate analysts typically define large institutional landlords as those who own at least 1,000 properties, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims to place purchasing restrictions on landlords with at least 350 properties. But even with the lowered threshold, only about 140 institutional investors in the U.S. meet the criteria, accounting for 0.59 percent of single-family homes. To spot large landlords’ effect on housing, squint and zoom in: Their ownership of single-family homes tends to be concentrated in certain regions. The markets where landlords with 350 or more properties own at least 3 percent of single-family homes are all in the Sun Belt. In Atlanta, such investors own about 4 percent of all single-family homes — the highest rate in the country. A tighter focus on the four Atlanta ZIP codes with the most large-scale owners reveals that they own 12 percent or more of the single-family homes.

Manufactured Housing is very odd the state’s assessment records

|

Manufactured Housing is very odd the state’s assessment records. Some towns assessors don’t use that code at all, preferring to either leave the housing style field blank or describing such structures as Ranch style. For example, Coeymans doesn’t have a single building that is Manufactured Housing but Cario has several hundred. In some towns its inconsistent – varies widely by property – probably whoever was assessor at the time.

But then again, assessment records are riddled with errors. If you look at the City of Albany assessment records, only two buildings were built before 1850, a fact that doesn’t take long to disprove.

A Fire Sale Has U.S. Office Buildings Going for 90% Off – WSJ

|

A Fire Sale Has U.S. Office Buildings Going for 90% Off – WSJ

America’s battered office market is holding a fire sale, featuring some buildings marked down by more than 90%.

In Chicago, real-estate developer Marc Calabria bought a 485,000-square-foot office building for $4 million. The building sold for $68.1 million a decade ago.

Developer Asher Luzzatto paid a mere $5.3 million for the Denver Energy Center, after a foreclosure process. The two-building complex sold for $176 million in 2013.

Even the federal government’s landlord is getting in on the act. The General Services Administration last month sold a 940,000-square-foot building to a residential converter for $24 million, a tiny fraction of its value a few years ago.

Landlords and their lenders held on to their office towers for years, hoping for a turnaround after Covid. Now, they are accepting enormous losses. Owners and creditors are capitulating to the reality that more employees are splitting their work time between home and office. They are also resigned to stubbornly higher interest rates, which lower property values and make it harder for buyers to borrow.