The second CB Richard Ellis Multi-Housing Summit Florida starts tomorrow, and I had a chance to get a preview from one of the key principals for the event.
Gerard Yetming, a senior vice president for CBRE in Fort Lauderdale, said the event will attract more than 550 owners, operators and other sector experts for the day-long event at The Four Seasons Miami on Brickell Avenue.
Yetming, who has completed more than $6.4 billion in multi-family assignments, said interest in the summit has exploded.
“We put it on last year, not really being sure how well it would be received,” he said. “It far exceeded our expectations.”
Highlights include keynote presentations by Jeff Atwater, chief financial officer for the state of Florida, and Stephen Owens, president of Swire Properties. Owens headed the master planning of Brickell Key in Downtown Miami, for which he spearheaded the construction of several market-making office and multi-family projects.
Other summit highlights include a Florida forecast, sessions on the condominium and single-family housing markets, a private capital report, a land use update, and more.
You can get all of the details at cbremultihousingsummit.com.
I went to this event last year and, trust me, if you’re in the multi-family business and you’re not there, you’re missing the boat. It is a bubbling cauldron of transactional opportunity.
About the market
Despite recent growth in the South Florida multi-housing market, Yetming said, there’s still a lot of opportunity out there.
“We’ve gone 11 years with minimal growth in the institutional inventory,” he said. “There’s still a very strong appetite. People are willing to pay very high prices for land, and the yields on costs are quite compressed – especially for urban settings where you have a live, work, play type of environment.”
South Florida, Yetming said, is and continues to become an international gateway area. You see lots of interest from private and institutional capital, as well as excellent property performance on rents and vacancy.
Flight capital from poorly performing or politically oppressive economies is always a factor in South Florida’s success, he said, but international interest also comes from vibrant economies, too.
“We kind of have the best of both worlds,” he said.
I asked Yetming about the difference between Dade and Broward counties on the multi-housing front. That’s starting to get blurred, he said. Broward used to be a defined institutional market. Now institutions are starting to get more comfortable with investing in Miami, he said.
And the demographics are changing, with Broward seeing more households being formed by international immigrants.
“We consider the three counties, really, a mega-region,” he said. “Eventually, we think it will be one homogeneous metropolitan area.”
Yetming also agreed with me that South Florida’s developing regional and local mass-transit networks are becoming a key driver in multi-family development, with some developers interested only in transit-oriented projects.
So, what’s the message for the South Florida multi-housing market? Yetming is very optimistic.
“The future is still very bright for Florida. For people concerned about the new supply, we’re only barely catching up to where we were 10 years ago,” he said.
