Real Estate Investment – Florida Multifamily

By | June 24, 2022

As most of my clients are aware, I am a broker with Cushman & Wakefield – Commercial Property Southwest Florida in Fort Myers.  I specialize in multifamily real estate development, trades, and industrial.  Below is a blog entry from my SW Florida blog I am the author of regarding real estate investment in Southwest Florida.

Welcome to my ranting and raving blog post about the Lee County commercial real estate market.  Get used to the ranting and raving, but I do this with the intent of informing, educating, and providing value to you as a novice or seasoned real estate investor.  Today’s rant will be to all of the buyers and sellers out there who are researching and wondering what the trending food group in the commercial real estate industry is.  I’m going to have a tough time answering that using only one.  But, if I had to pick one hot sector today out of Multifamily, Industrial, Retail, Medical, Office, and Land, I would have to say it’s Multifamily.  I am partially bias because I am one of the multifamily specialists over here in our office, and I was trying to come up with the runner up most competitive.  I just couldn’t pull the trigger on Office yet.  While office is on an absolute tear, multifamily continues to be the most demanded real estate investment vehicle where occupancy is sky high and vacancies in some areas are non-existent, suppressing Cap Rates, increasing rental rates, and increasing values.  Multifamily zoned land has depleted to levels of pre-recession.  If you are lucky enough to find zoned land, be prepared to either get in a bidding war, or be priced out for new start development.  There is only so much you can pay on your land basis if you plan on developing.

Currently, I am targeting infill land sites that are zoned C-2 Commercial.  As per the comprehensive plan, the future use can be multifamily residential, but you will have to re-zone the land to achieve this.  Ever deal with Planning and Zoning here?  They move at a similar pace as the ObamaCare website.  Just when you think you are getting somewhere, something else comes up to delay you.  It takes a market specialist with first-hand experience to make this zoning transition effective and efficient.  That is why anyone in the market for multifamily should consider me to be their go-to-guy.

Our current infill land sites that are already entitled for multifamily development are moving along quickly.  I currently represent 2 investors where my role as a project manager is to oversee the development of nearly 100 units in the first half of 2014 with possibly another 100 units by Q4 of 2014.

I am currently comprising a list of dozens of market rate complexes in Ft. Myers and the evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of new product to the market.  Furthermore, we currently hold in our possession a third party market study which basically screams “NEW DEVELOPMENT PLEASE IN SOUTH FORT MYERS!!”  There is a need for nearly 1,000 market rate units in South Fort Myers alone and currently, there are only about 400 units in permitting and planning.  Of those 400, 325 of them are from a rental community that our office is representing on development.

If you are one of the multifamily investors in the market in Florida, there is heavy evidence showing that South Fort Myers is an emerging market for opportunity that nobody but our office is pioneering at the moment.  My instinct tells me that by the first quarter of 2015, once our product is built, stabilized, and performing at better Cap Rates then older existing inventory, the market will chase what we build and try to replicate our concept.  At that moment, I begin pulling our investors in a different direction in another emerging opportunity.  We enjoy the fact that it is the clients of THIS office that achieved already what everyone else is now attempting to achieve.

For additional information, please call the office at 239-489-3600 and ask for me, Scott Allan, multifamily specialist, and I will be happy to share with you the evidence I portray in this blog article.