Dallas apartment builders hope less space means more profits

Provided By: dallasnews.com



 

They say good things come in small packages.

Builders are hoping that old saying holds true for apartments.

To hold down monthly rental costs, apartment developers are scaling down some rental units to the size of a hotel suite. They’re betting that renters will make do with less to live in a posh apartment in a prime location.

“If we can give someone luxury living at a price they can afford, they’ll jump at it,” said developer Matt Segrest, president of apartment builder Alamo Manhattan.

At Monaco, Alamo’s new building in Dallas’ Uptown neighborhood, a 571-square-foot studio apartment will set you back $1,459 a month.

While small by Dallas standards, the apartment comes with a view of the Katy Trail, top-of-the line appliances and use of the rental project’s many amenities.

“Our small units are in high demand,” Segrest said. “People want to live where the action is.”

Alamo Manhattan has leased more than a quarter of the Monaco project and is trying to slow rentals to catch up with construction. The average unit size in the entire project is about 800 square feet.

The trend toward smaller apartments started on the West Coast and quickly spread across the country.

The 24-story SkyHouse Dallas apartment tower that’s under construction in Victory Park just north of downtown Dallas will have units that start in size at 577 square feet. The average size in the 336-apartment tower will be about 800 square feet.

“While our apartments are designed to be very efficient and therefore to meet our residents’ budgets, the floor-to-ceiling glass makes the apartments feel like a larger home,” said Thornton Kennedy, spokesman for developer Novare Group.

Dallas apartment architect Mark Humphreys said apartment sizes have dropped as development costs and rents have soared.

“It’s been a hot topic for some time,” he said. “New micro units are now below 400 square feet.

“We have these all over the country, and it’s done great.”

But efficiency apartments have to be done right for renters to accept them.

“The key to us is you have to have a separate sleeping area,” Humphreys said. “They don’t want to walk in the living room and there is the bedroom.”

Humphreys & Partners is putting the bed in an alcove off the main living area to give a sense of privacy.

“It seems to have a lot of legs,” Humphreys said.

At its Taylor apartment project under construction in Uptown, developer StreetLights Residential has studio units starting at less than 570 square feet.

StreetLights partner Tom Bakewell said they appeal to younger renters but not the older, empty nester tenants who are looking at the project.

“Their comment is this unit is too small,” Bakewell said at a recent apartment seminar in Dallas. “Our doors have been open a little over a month now, and 30 percent of our traffic coming in is an empty nester.”

Longtime Dallas apartment analyst Greg Willett said there is renter demand for all sizes of new rental units. But he cautions developers not to produce too many small units.

“You do see a lot of these units in San Francisco and New York, and it works in those markets where the rents are so incredibly high,” said Willett, vice president of Carrollton-based MPF Research. “In the middle of the country, overdoing these would be pretty easy.

“There is demand for this product, but it’s a niche.”

Keller Williams Realty Becomes Largest Real Estate Franchise in North America!

Provided By: http://moving-careers.com/keller-williams-realty-becomes-largest-real-estate-franchise-in-north-america/

Keller Williams Realty Becomes Largest Real Estate Franchise in North America
Company reports record growth, productivity and profitability gains;
announces expansion into the United Kingdom.

 

AUSTIN, TX (September 16, 2013) - With a net gain of 12,000 associates in the past year, Keller Williams Realty is now the largest real estate franchise in North America. The announcement, based on publicly available agent count data as of September 9, 2013, was made during Keller Williams Realty’s Midyear State of the Company presentation. Keller Williams is now home to more than 90,000 associates around the world.

 

“We are not a company of complacency,” CEO Mark Willis said. “We have the best business model in the industry and it’s leading to increased productivity, profitability and profit sharing that are at all-time highs for our company and unrivaled in our industry.”

 

In recent months, Keller Williams Realty has shattered its monthly records for listings taken, contracts written, commissions earned, owner profit and profit share:

 

• Year over year, units are up 8 percent, closed volume is up 17 percent and gross commission income is up 18 percent.
• Ninety-five percent of the company’s offices are profitable year to date – a figure that far outpaces the standard for franchise businesses.
• In the past 12 months, the company has distributed $58 million in profit share to associates, a 33 percent increase over the previous year.

 

Features for consumers include:

 

• The ability to search for homes based on criteria or by custom drawing on an interactive map;
• GPS localized data displays homes in a given area that match the consumer’s price range;
• The ability to easily swipe through galleries of photos to decide whether a home fits one’s needs and then add it to saved searches for convenient reference on the app or via the agent’s website, where the saved searches are synced;
• The ability to save notes on properties for future reference; and
• Faster communication between agents and consumers via call, text or email.

 

The strong growth, productivity and profitability gains follow a year of milestones for the company:

 

• The release of the Keller Williams mobile app – personally branded for each of the company’s 90,000 associates. In the past 30 days, more than 58,000 consumers have downloaded the app to their Apple and Android devices.
• Publication of co-founder Gary Keller’s new book, The ONE Thing, which has appeared on 117 bestseller lists, including The New York Times, where it has been on the business bestseller list for 5 months, and The Wall Street Journal, where it earned the #1 spot.

 

Willis used concepts from The ONE Thing to illustrate his presentation, which took place at Mega Camp, the real estate industry’s premier educational and networking event for top producers. “Keller Williams leaders, what you’re doing is lining up a perfect domino run,” he said. “Being #1 in agent count in the United States was our first domino. We’re on our way to knocking over bigger and bigger dominos until we’re #1 in agent count, transactions and volume all across the world.”

 

Keller Williams Worldwide President Chris Heller also announced the company’s expansion into the United Kingdom. In recent years, the company’s global division has announced franchise agreements in Austria, Germany, Indonesia, Southern Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and Vietnam. Heller touted the achievements of the company’s regions outside of North America and welcomed more than 100 international guests from countries including Brazil, China, Colombia, Ghana, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland and Russia.

 

“Around the globe, entrepreneurs, brokers and agents are looking for and asking for what we offer,” Heller said. “They crave our models, systems, training and technology. And because Keller Williams can offer all of those at a level they have never seen before, we are attracting tremendous talent and gaining momentum.”

 

“Success leaves clues,” Keller Williams President Mary Tennant said during her State of the Culture update. “And your unprecedented achievements this year all flow from the culture of success, caring and opportunity you created and are enhancing every day.”

   

10 months later, Hurricane Sandy's 'blessing': Treasures wash ashore

Provided By: CNN.COM

Professed "Jersey girl" Christeena Hockin-Minopetros began collecting sea glass from the New Jersey shore when she was 5. She recalls that when she was younger, before the glass became scarce, you could walk home with a bucketful after a day at the beach.

Now, 10 months after Hurricane Sandy hammered the Atlantic coastline, the Florida resident says she's shocked by how many of the frosty relics she found while walking along Sea Bright Beach back home this summer.

 

"It's everywhere," Hockin-Minopetros said, explaining how she found two large bags of sea glass in a variety of hues: brown, white, blue, milky green and a "gorgeous" red piece she can't take her eyes off.

 We can thank Sandy for the finds, said coastal geologist Cheryl Hapke.

"This is an epic summer for a collection of beach glass," she said.

Sea glass, or beach glass, begins essentially as garbage -- broken glass dumped into fresh or salt water. Over time, waves, water and sand smooth its sharp edges. It's the smaller pieces of sea glass that usually get brought onto shore for people to pick up, Hapke said.

It's well-known that hurricanes erode seashores and hamper tourism, but, according to Hapke, a storm like Sandy -- which boasted record-high waves in late October -- can filter larger, coarse materials from the seabed and wash them onto the shoreline.

That's good news for beach-side businesses that sell their finds.

 

As Sandy swallowed beaches and deterred patrons, businesses in southern New Jersey's Cape May Point suffered, said resident Jeanette Bartolomeo. Her son-in-law's Sunset Beach Gift Shops, where Bartolomeo works as the jewelry manager, were among the few fortunate.

 

Never mind the sea glass; Bartolomeo's eye is drawn to the "Cape May Diamonds" -- clear quartz pebbles that, when polished, resemble real diamonds -- and Sunset Beach Gift Shops are known for their collection.

 The pure quartz pebbles, which break off from pockets of quartz crystal in the upper reaches of the Delaware River, have always been in abundance, but bigger pieces churn up after a storm.

That's why Hurricane Sandy and the February nor'easter were "a blessing," Bartolomeo said.

 "Thank God they keep coming in," she said.

 Though Sandy didn't damage Cape May as much as other parts of New Jersey, many residents and visitors assumed beaches and shops there were closed, so Cape May tourism suffered and business was slower than usual, Bartolomeo said.

"We had people calling, 'Are you open now?' " she said. "But we were never closed."

 

Gov. Chris Christie's administration announced last week that every public boardwalk and beach along the New Jersey shore is now open, after 10 months of renovations and "beach replenishing."

 

Bartolomeo said she's already seen an increase in tourists this summer at Sunset Beach, where visitors can be found scouring the beach for the quarter-size "diamonds" washing up on the shore.

Despite the good news for many businesses, Hockin-Minopetros is concerned that beach replenishing -- by which sand from other areas is used to revitalize an eroded beach -- might affect the abundance of sea glass, much like she worries construction and spiking insurance rates along the coast could affect the shoreline's pristine quaintness.

"I'm afraid New Jersey's shoreline will be one big McMansion, and that saddens me deeply," she said.

In addition to the sea glass she collects to craft into jewelry, which she sells, Hockin-Minopetros also keeps a personal collection of about 500 "really fantastic" pieces, most of which she collected while living in Greece.

But her best piece is one she picked up in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, she said.

The heavy, 8-inch-long, clear glass is actually a deck prism, which sailors used in the upper deck of a ship to illuminate the ship's passageways below deck. It's one she won't be selling, she said.

 

"I only keep the real unusual," she said.

Dallas developers step up to fill Midland’s housing crisis

Provided By: www.bizjournals.com

A group of Dallas-based developers have started a new $12.8 million urban loft project in downtown Midland as part of the city's overall plan to mitigate the housing shortage tied to the oil and gas shale boom.

The public-private partnership project, dubbed the Wall Street Lofts, is the west Texas city's first downtown residential housing. Midland is constructing an adjacent parking garage for public and private parking.

Shale drilling in the Permian Basin in West Texas has brought an influx of workers who need places to live. In the past, Dallas-based hotel developers have stepped up to help with housing, however, developers can't build fast enough, which means a room could rent for $150 to $200 a night, in some cases.

 

The four-story, 108-unit building, which includes 5,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, will help mitigate that demand. The developers say they expect the residential units to be quickly absorbed because of the severe housing shortage.

 

The development partnership includesRoger Gault, Robert Gunby and C.W. Fields. Compass Bank is providing the construction financing. Greystar Real Estate Partners will lease and manage the project.

 

Midland's unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, which is well below the state and Dallas-Fort Worth unemployment rate, which sit at 6.4 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

The project is scheduled for completion in December 2014.

Agent Benefits of Using CSS

Provided By: Showings.com

 

Agent Benefits of Using CSS

• More showings on your listings because CSS listings are easier to show
• Increased feedback for showings on your listings
• Enhanced communication with your sellers
• CSS is open 33% longer than standard real estate offices
• Increased exposure for your listings
• Get more listings using CSS as a listing tool
• Instant notifications of showings on your listings via email and/or text messages
• CSS ‘Listing Announcement’ notifies showing agents of changes to the property
• Using CSS is like having your own personal assistant to set showing appointments
• Customized “branding” of your reports with your logo and picture
• Call one number to schedule multiple appointments
• Easily reschedule and cancel appointments
• Professional and courteous customer service representatives dedicated to your call
• Sellers can approve or decline showings via text message using ‘Text2Approve‘ feature