Atlanta is a hot spot for investing in multifamily assets as the market emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic. The apartment market’s fundamentals, including occupancy and rent growth, have held up considerably well, making the market extremely attractive to buyers. Because the Atlanta market has an abundance of capital looking to be deployed, prices are being driven up significantly and cap rates driven down. Multifamily has outperformed many other commercial real estate sectors during the pandemic, considered a “hot-ticket asset class” by investors, which leads to new capital swarming the Atlanta apartment market. Many multifamily properties are now routinely trading at a sub-4 percent cap rate, indicative of the vast amount of available capital and the confidence that investors have in the product type. However, rather than clearing the market and searching for as many prospective buyers as they can, sellers are looking at a smaller subset of dominant, well-known investors that they know will deliver and get the transaction done. They are seeking six to 12 well-recognized, established players that can execute a deal at top prices. It is an extremely competitive process, and all buyers know they have to swing high on pricing. Oftentimes, no one broker is selected …
While retail and office have had to adjust to a COVID-19 world, industrial has been the beneficiary. E-commerce, supply chain and last mile delivery are all the rage. But what has really gotten economic development leaders, elected officials and the media excited are the massive warehouse deals in cities like Atlanta that have created headlines and driven investor capital to industrial. Atlanta didn’t even truly get into the big-box industrial development game until 2004. From 1960 to 2006 there were just 13 buildings larger than 1 million square feet constructed in the metro area, but 11 were build-to-suits for users such as JC Penney, Kmart, Publix, Home Depot and the General Services Administration. Only Duke Realty (2004) and Majestic (2006) developed speculative properties spanning more than 1 million square feet. Between 2006 and 2015, there were 11 buildings more than 1 million square feet added to the city’s inventory, with seven of those south of Interstate 20, three in the Northeast 85 corridor and one on the Interstate 20 West Corridor. As Atlanta’s economy roared back in 2016, the market exploded with 17 new big-box facilities in just five years. While prior to 2015 the field of players constructing these …
By Claire Blevins and Collin Devaney, NAI Brannen Goddard We’ve all seen the depressing commercial real estate news stories about the state of the office market, with words like “bleak,” “hazy” or “obsolete” in the headlines. Questions surround every major market, including Atlanta — a metro market known for its dependable economy and robust demand. Admittedly, Atlanta has had its struggles during the pandemic, like slow leasing activity and rising rental rates, but not everything is doom and gloom. New City Properties, in the middle of breaking ground on Mailchimp’s new headquarters, announced it was upping the budget to prepare for future pandemics, including setting money aside for technology that is not even available yet. Other developers are choosing to prioritize private green space over expensive machinery. Midtown’s new Norfolk Southern headquarters, opening by the third quarter of 2021, takes advantage of its 3.4-acre lot by developing a campus-style hub filled with parks and a rooftop garden. Employees who utilize these outdoor spaces decrease the risk of airborne transmissions, as well as promote healthy habits. Not every office building has the room for large outdoor forums, so other owners are doing away with cubicles and building out private offices. Or …
Commercial real estate sentiment has returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to NAIOP’s fall 2021 survey. Those views are good news for the commercial real estate industry generally, and the metro Atlanta office market is helping to provide some impressive specifics behind the rising optimism. At 2 million square feet of office space, Atlanta led the country in positive absorption in third-quarter 2021, approximately 700,000 square feet ahead of No. 3 market New York City, according to Colliers International research. Atlanta’s relatively low costs, attractive weather, growing demographics and educated labor force are big advantages for the city’s economy and office market. Metro Atlanta ranked No. 8 for year-over-year job growth in August among the largest U.S. metro areas with an increase of 124,300 new jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Atlanta recorded an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent that month for the market, 210 basis points lower the national figure. Atlanta also ranks No. 8 nationally for tech talent, according to CBRE, with total tech occupations having increased 15.2 percent from 2015 to 2020. Savills cited Atlanta’s highest growth rate for technology-related graduates in the country, a big draw for innovative companies looking to relocate to or …
We’ve all seen the depressing commercial real estate news stories about the state of the office market, with words like “bleak,” “hazy” or “obsolete” in the headlines. Questions surround every major market, including Atlanta — a metro market known for its dependable economy and robust demand. Admittedly, Atlanta has had its struggles during the pandemic, like slow leasing activity and rising rental rates, but not everything is doom and gloom. New City Properties, in the middle of breaking ground on Mailchimp’s new headquarters, announced it was upping the budget to prepare for future pandemics, including setting money aside for technology that is not even available yet. Other developers are choosing to prioritize private green space over expensive machinery. Midtown’s new Norfolk Southern headquarters, opening by the third quarter of 2021, takes advantage of its 3.4-acre lot by developing a campus-style hub filled with parks and a rooftop garden. Employees who utilize these outdoor spaces decrease the risk of airborne transmissions, as well as promote healthy habits. Not every office building has the room for large outdoor forums, so other owners are doing away with cubicles and building out private offices. Or if they have cubes, they’re advised to choose bigger …
The financial impact the COVID-19 economic shutdown is having on tenants and landlords is a difficult mix of immediate drastic reduction (or elimination) of revenue, along with little or no ability to forecast when the end will come. This combination of severity and unclear duration makes finding potential win-win compromises a real challenge for tenants and landlords in the metro Atlanta area. While deal pipelines across the industry have ground to a halt, companies, teams and individuals are using this sudden influx of time as an opportunity to take up important tasks that, while not producing revenue, will set up future opportunities. They are catching up on conversations, expanding their networks, engaging with social media, doing industry research, continuing their professional educations and learning new skills. Landlords, on the other hand, are having to take this challenge head on and are testing the waters with solutions like pause agreements, rent deferrals (in many cases, equivalent term is added at the end of these leases) and other creative ways to provide relief to their tenants while not endangering their own interests or those of their lenders. There’s no certainty that these issues won’t have to be addressed again, periodically, as the …
In the words of Marilyn Monroe, “Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” The retail market forges ahead in its quest to essentially reinvent itself in response to the ever-increasing growth in online sales. This revitalization is characterized by decreasing the footprint of their brick and mortar stores and expanding the size of their e-commerce fulfillment centers. Fortunately, the biggest beneficiary of this growing trend is the industrial market. There’s been a lot of talk about retailers suffering from the boom in internet sales. Quite frankly, do you really believe a retailer cares if they sell their product in a storefront or through the internet and their e-commerce delivery system? I contend they do not care as long as it is their product being sold. The retailers that do not embrace internet sales, in conjunction with their in-store sales, will be going the way of companies like Toys “R” Us — losing sales and eventually closing down because they are not able to compete in today’s online world. The competition between e-commerce delivery systems has heated up even further due to “just in time” or last-mile delivery. Customer expectation on some items is shifting from two-day …
As we enter the last quarter of 2019, well into the longest economic expansion in history, the Atlanta retail real estate market is healthy and active, with multi-year retail rent and occupancy growth. The city’s retail investment sales volume totaled $2.2 billion in 2018, making it the eighth most active retail investment market in the country. Not a gateway market, yet In my career, Atlanta has always been a “non-institutional” market, and has stayed largely off the radar of deep pools of institutional capital aimed at New York, Boston, San Francisco and other gateway cities with deeper economies, higher rents, lower cap rates and higher values. Nevertheless Atlanta’s population, GDP and growth make it the undisputed capital of the Southeast by a country mile. The metro’s shopping centers have benefitted from this paradox: it has the biggest economy in the South and is among the top metros in the nation for employment and population growth. However, its average rents are lower and its average retail cap rates are higher than almost every one of its peers in the Southeast and the United States at large. Despite the overblown narrative of the retail apocalypse and despite how or when the current …
Georgia’s secondary and tertiary multifamily markets continue to demonstrate growing attraction as capital flows from investors leaving the Atlanta metro area in search of higher yield transactions. The greater Georgia market, which spans the state excluding the 29-county Atlanta metro area, has become a destination for investment due to growing capital inflows to the Southeast and cap rate compression in metro Atlanta. Multifamily transaction volume in the Southeast totaled $11.8 billion in second-quarter 2019, up 25 percent year-over-year, allowing more capital to enter Georgia’s secondary and tertiary markets. The trickle-down effect of investment into these markets, boosted by strong job growth and increasing renter households, works to promote a strong renter marketplace with increasing returns in the region. Georgia markets demonstrated tightening fundamentals and noticeable rent gains in recent years, particularly south of Atlanta, due to supply-side pressure and limited new deliveries. According to CoStar Group, metro Atlanta delivered nearly 11,000 units, up 15 percent year-over-year through the second quarter, while Georgia’s secondary and tertiary markets delivered roughly 2,200 in total, down 40 percent. Greater Georgia’s lack of supply has generated pent-up demand in multifamily, resulting in residents who are willing to pay more for higher value assets while landlords …
In 1864, General William T. Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground, including the area around the Zero Mile Post marking the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Now, 155 years later, South Downtown is on fire again but this time, it is as one of the hottest development submarkets in the Southeast. With the still-active downtown rail yards at its center, more than $10 billion in new development is either completed, under construction or in the planning stages. This “Downtown Ring of Fire” stretches from Centennial Olympic Park and Mercedes-Benz Stadium to Castleberry Hill and over to Underground Atlanta. The project SSG Realty Partners recently brought to market, Artisan Yards, is a 9.9-acre site at the intersection of Ted Turner Drive (historic Spring Street) and Whitehall Street. It is currently the headquarters of Gourmet Foods International, which has outgrown the property and is relocating to a new facility. The primary catalyst for this significant new development momentum is the $1.6 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons and the 2018 MLS Cup champions Atlanta United. The $192 million renovation of State Farm Arena and the $25 million expansion of Centennial Olympic Park were also critical in creating the …