Already this year, the Boca Raton-based brokerage has closed on $244 million in sales, with another $200 million in pending contracts.
"Capital is clearly looking for well-located, quality apartments," Marc deBaptiste, Atlantic Realty co-founding managing director, tells GlobeSt.com. "There is a number of real estate trust and pension fund advisers and even more private sources looking at apartments to purchase throughout Florida."
Market watchers such as Texas-based M/PF Research Inc. and New York-based Reis Inc. are reporting clearly defined changes in the Southeast Florida market indicators.
Overall apartment occupancy is about 97.7%, according to a recent M/PF market report. The markets of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties showed annual product absorption of about 16,160 units last year, with demand more than double for the 7,122 units constructed during the same time period.
Such demand pushed the average quoted rent up 4.6% last year to an estimated average of $884 a month, according to M/PF. A recent REIS report estimates the vacancy rate in Miami-Dade averaged about 2.2% at the end of last year, even with the addition of about 2,700 new units.
"And, by 2003, this rate is expected to reach only 3%, as a total of almost 10,000 units are added over the next three years," according to the REIS report. "Over the next three years, rental growth is forecast to average 4.3% per year."
In deBaptiste's opinion, the market activity comes down to simple economics. "Supply is diminishing considerably," he says.
The total number of multifamily permits issue in Broward County, for instance, between 1998-2000 is down about 31.4%, deBaptiste says. The county's average rental occupancy is about 97.5%.
Meanwhile, Broward County absorbed nearly 4,500 units during the one-year period ended Dec. 31, deBaptiste notes. Much of that is attributed to an annual 6.41% increase in the county's employment base and almost an 8% increase in total population.
"That is up considerably over the prior year," he says. "Broward is just one of the hot markets. Palm Beach and Miami-Dade are all highly sought after right now. Buyers are coming back to the market because the employment growth has been very strong, the absorption of new units are at a record level and the number of permits issued is way down."
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