Texas Market Reports

Houston continues its trajectory as an exemplary market with strong multifamily fundamentals that continue to attract large-scale investment nationwide. The positive trends of strong job growth and sustained apartment demand are forecast to hold thanks to a confluence of factors. To better understand the dynamics shaping Houston’s multifamily market, it is important to look closely at several major drivers, including residual demand from Hurricane Harvey and record employment growth, as well as the impact of rising interest rates and incentives introduced by the Opportunity Zone legislation. More than a year since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, Houston’s multifamily market continues to rebound. Overall occupancy has risen 180 basis points year over year to its current rate of 90 percent. Residents displaced by Harvey’s flooding, particularly in hard-hit areas like the Energy Corridor, contributed to the increased demand for apartments. In the third quarter of 2018 alone, absorption greatly outpaced deliveries, with almost 9,200 units newly occupied and less than 6,000 units delivered. As developers taper new apartment deliveries, we expect demand to continue to outpace deliveries for the foreseeable future. Rents advanced 3 percent between October of 2017 and 2018 — almost twice the rate of growth of the previous 12 months. …

In the world of multifamily development, it’s rare to find a market that quite literally checks every box. But in Dallas-Fort Worth’s (DFW) Far Northeast submarket, which encompasses Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney, that’s precisely the case. In terms of fundamental demand drivers, Collin County is growing by about 80 new residents per day, one of the fastest rates in the country. The county’s population is expected to increase by nearly 800,000 over the next two decades, and to add more than 300,000 new jobs during that stretch as well. The region also epitomizes the corporate relocations for which DFW has become renowned. The arrivals of Toyota North America, JPMorgan Chase, Liberty Mutual and FedEx have already brought thousands of high-paying jobs to the Far Northeast submarket. Just as important, these companies have established precedents for medium-sized companies to follow suit and keep the job growth train rolling. The impacts of those demand drivers on multifamily growth in the region has been tremendous. But there’s more to the story of this area’s multifamily explosion than the increase in jobs and population. Lesser-Known Factors While corporate relocations have brought swaths of millennials to the area — in Frisco, that group comprises …

Despite being located 80 miles apart, the Austin and San Antonio metros might as well be on different planets when comparing growth and multifamily operations during the current business cycle. While both multifamily markets have been in growth mode since the Great Recession, Austin has outpaced San Antonio with a rapid rate of expansion during this time. Austin’s job growth has risen steadily at an average annual pace near 4 percent since 2010. In addition, strong migration to the metro has contributed to the 20,000-plus households that have been created annually during this span. In comparison, San Antonio’s total employment has risen by an average of 2.7 percent annually for the past eight years, though the rate has dipped below 2 percent over the past four quarters. The pace of migration remains healthy, but the rate of household formation has been slower in the Alamo City. These differences in job growth, migration and household formation have impacted each metro’s apartment market differently. Development Disparities Developers have targeted Austin over the past few years, and the market has received significant supply additions. The metro has consistently ranked in the top 10 markets across the country for new deliveries over the past …