With growth shifting from South Florida to Central and North Florida, a prominent multifamily-housing investment-advisory brokerage from Boca Raton is opening a local office to devote more resources to the Orlando area.

Apartment Realty Advisors is opening the full-service office at 400 Park Ave. South in Winter Park, reflecting the South Florida company’s growing Orlando-area client base and a shift in statewide demographics that favors Central Florida, said Ken Krasnow, the company’s chief operating officer.

Apartment Realty Advisors is the nation’s largest privately held, full-service investment-advisory brokerage focusing exclusively on multifamily housing. It has had a strong presence in the region for years, closing on almost $1.4 billion worth of transactions locally from 2005 to mid-2007 on behalf of major institutional and individual investors.
 

Its Central Florida client base has included Broad Street Partners, TIAA/CREF, Falcone Group, Madison Realty Investors, Camden Property Trust, and Bainbridge Communities. And the company is now marketing properties on behalf of Equity Residential, LeCesse Development Corp. and Del American.

Krasnow said the company wants to leverage its existing brand and client base to expand geographically throughout the state.

After taking a close look at Metropolitan Orlando’s “strong, growing demographics, and the continued expansion of its local business base,” Krasnow said, he elected to open the local office in preparation for further growth.

“In the rental community, there’s been a push to the north, northeast and western parts of the state,” he said. The company is “staying ahead of the curve,” he added, and “as the market continues to evolve, there is an untapped client base out there, one which is much more local in nature. We will look to capture that market.”

While the apartment sector in Central Florida has softened during the past year, industry specialists contend that it remains healthy overall, especially when compared with single-family housing.

The Orlando area’s apartment-vacancy rates have mostly risen during the past year, but so have average rental rates, according to a second-quarter survey by Marcus & Millichap, a California-based commercial brokerage with extensive operations in Central Florida.

A slowing economy will further ease demand for apartments, but apartment construction locally is already at a 25-year low, according to the report by Greg Clemmer, market analyst with the company’s Real Estate Investment Services section.

Further offsetting the slowdown in construction is the growing competition from the “shadow rental stock” found in condo and town-home complexes throughout the Orlando area and Florida’s other large markets. That unsold inventory — or units that speculators bought expecting to resell — are now being leased because of the sales slowdown.

A Marcus & Millichap’s Orlando-area report prepared for Greg Matus, regional manager in Orlando, and Stephen St. Clair, senior investment associate and director of the National Multihousing Group in Orlando, projects that developers will deliver 625 apartment units by the end of this year. That would be well below the five-year average of 2,800 units.

Rents overall — taking into account discounts taken from higher asking rates — are expected to rise about 5 percent this year to an average of $853 a month, the company said.
Source:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-multihousing19sep19,0,1003971.story