Houston’s Overbuilt Apartment Market; Texas’s Luxe Home Market Stays Strong

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Photo: telwink via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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  • Re: Overbuilt Apartment Market
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    After reading this and the Camden article, the net effect is some softening of rents for completed projects. Those opening soon will have to hustle to attract renters.
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    Overall, I’m glad to see this since the market was getting a bit too heated on pricing and population. It will be okay with me to plateau for at least a year. Bonus: Mayor Turner could use the extra time to fill all of those potholes before more people move into town.

  • Off the top of my head I can easily think of a few thousand higher end units that will be opening up in the next year or so. Sucks to be late to the party I guess.

  • Is the “Overbuilt Apartment Market” really news to anyone who’s been following Swamplot or other Houston RE sites?

  • I think we will really just end up where we should have been all along, if there wasn’t a development lag.

    Since 2010 we have added 730,000 people and by 2017 we will have added 80,000 apartments.

    Due to the lag in building

    1) We were not building enough during the boom years

    1.1) and we saw the rapid rent increases.

    2) Now we are going to finish 30,000 after the boom years

    2.1) and we will see rent return to “Houston” levels.

  • @awp Not all those people are moving into apartments. Many are building homes, building townhomes, rehabbing old homes, or buying homes from people leaving Houston.

  • @Superdave:

    “Not all those people are moving into apartments.”

    Yea, no shit, but, historically we have seen about 10 apartment units adsorbed per 100 increase in population, so over this whole cycle we are just about in line with what we have seen historically. Development lags have caused rents to go up during the boom and are going to cause rents to go back down to “Houston” levels now.

    “Many are building homes, building townhomes, ”

    single family homes have been lagging normal trends (relative to population) too. Which, again, is why we have seen prices rise.

    “rehabbing old homes,”

    So someone else needs a home.

    “or buying homes from people leaving Houston.”

    That was a 730,000 net population increase.

  • @awp – By rehabbing, I mean occupying formerly vacant homes. In my hood there are hundreds of vacant homes just sitting empty. At least 5 vacant homes on my street have been rehabbed and re-occupied in the last couple years. Touche on the net gain – I missed that.

  • Superdave, how’s the weather outside of Chernobyl? Hundreds of vacant houses in your area? Damn! Did you wake up in Detroit? Regular Swampies will come to the rescue.

  • @J – Go east of 288.