Industry News

The Apartments.com Blog just put out some great social media tips for apartment owners, developers and managers. Here are just a few we thought you might find helpful:

1. Create a Pinterest board of apartment-friendly decorating ideas for your residents.
2. Partner with a popular neighborhood restaurant to provide your residents with a Facebook exclusive offer.  Post a status update with coupon code to redeem 20% off.  It will make your fans feel really special.
3. Tweet street cleaning schedules to make sure your residents don’t get tickets.
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One of AvalonBay’s new AVA property’s goals is to “activate that social mindset” of the Gen Y renter that it’s courting. Doing that requires leasing agents.

“At AVA, the folks who are working there are energized by the neighborhood,” says Deborah A. Coombs, senior vice president of property operations at AvalonBay. “They want a little bit different work experience. It’s a little more casual and a little more relaxed. There’s a social connection that is both the thing they used the tech whether it’s Facebook or Twitter.”
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Demand for U.S. apartment buildings is surging as the homeownership rate hovers near the lowest level since 1998 and government-supported mortgage companies provide record levels of financing for apartment properties. That’s fueling a rush by investors to buy buildings and helping lenders recover 75 percent of the value of defaulted mortgages tied to multifamily housing, the highest recovery rate on all commercial property.

Sales of U.S. apartment properties totaled $3.8 billion in January, a 53 percent increase from the same month a year earlier, the strongest start to the year compared with offices, and shopping centers, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based commercial property data firm.

The above is an excerpt from “Recovery of Commercial Property Fueled by Apartments: Mortgages” by Oshrat Carmiel. Read the full article on Bloomberg.

Low rates, high CRA goals, and the improving LIHTC market drove a strong year for our nation’s top lenders.
By Jerry Ascierto

The comeback that began in 2010 just kept on coming. The affordable housing debt industry posted another strong year in 2011, as historically low interest rates drove refinancing and acquisition opportunities, and the New Issue Bond Program (NIBP) resuscitated the 4 percent market.

For owners, developers, and lenders alike, there was a lot to cheer about in 2011. Low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) prices rebounded in a big way, climbing up in a year when both LIBOR and the 10-year Treasury were dropping down to rock-bottom lows.
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By Jerry Ascierto

Marie Head has been at the helm of the FHA’s multifamily division since November, and she hasn’t even stopped to decorate her office walls.

In the three months since Head replaced Carol Galante as deputy assistant secretary of multifamily housing programs, she has already helped streamline the FHA’s delivery system through new regulations, while issuing new parameters around large loans.

Turns out, she was just getting started. Her latest move is ushering in the long-awaited Tax Credit Pilot Program, mandated by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act.

The pilot program aims to drastically speed up the processing time of FHA-backed deals that use low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs). In the past, LIHTC developers had difficulty using the FHA—the LIHTC program carries strict deadlines, and affordable housing owners and developers just couldn’t wait around for the FHA’s notoriously slow turnaround times.

This new program aims to fix all that. “Expediting our delivery system is a big agenda for us,” says Head. “And it’s one of my biggest priorities.”

The pilot program will start out in four markets—Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Los Angeles—and will focus exclusively on Sec. 223(f) deals from about a dozen different lenders. Head believes that the FHA can cut the time it needs to review and approve LIHTC deals using Sec. 223(f) from about one year to a few months.
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New online database promotes Section 3 hiring and contracting opportunities for Detroit businesses and residents

WASHINGTON – More very low-income senior citizens in Michigan will have access to affordable supportive housing thanks to $11.7 million in housing assistance announced today by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The funding announced today will help non-profit organizations produce additional accessible housing, offer rental assistance, and facilitate supportive services for the elderly.
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It is no secret that HUD’s LEAN program has had an underwriting queue in place for some time; however, there is significant evidence that suggests that queue times are shrinking. In fact, the a7 Green queue (existing HUD insured deals that are not seeking a term extension) has been eliminated and the a7 Regular queue is currently experiencing less than a 30 day wait! 
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The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will start a new pilot program in the spring charged with getting affordable housing deals done much more quickly.

The Tax Credit Pilot Program was originally mandated more than three years ago by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) of 2008. But a change in administrations, and several bureaucratic hold-ups, have delayed its implementation. The program, modeled on the LEAN program for healthcare loans, will expedite the processing of deals using low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs).

The FHA has made many programmatic strides in its desire to do more LIHTC deals—essentially making its process and requirements more borrower-friendly over the past three years. The agency even included a chapter on tax credit deals for the first time in its latest revision of the Multifamily Accelerated Processing (MAP) guide.

Read the full article on MFE Online.

Reprinted with permission from Multifamily Executive, a publication of Hanley Wood © December 2011

For FY2011, total endorsements for FHA’s multifamily programs were $11.6 billion, exceeding FY2010 by 12%. In spite of a 13% decrease in staff over the past 5 years, firm commitments issued by HUD increased in FY2011 by 23% from FY2010. These levels of endorsements and commitments are new levels of achievement for the FHA multifamily program. During FY2011, HUD Multifamily received 1,312 applications, issued 1,303 commitments and 1,139 endorsements. Also during FY2011, the Office of Multifamily Programs rolled out its Breaking Ground: Delivering Results Initiative. The initiative rolls out a series of process and management changes to FHA’s multifamily application procedures. After testing pilot programs in Ft. Worth and Baltimore earlier in the year, Breaking Ground is being rolled out in four waves to the other Hub offices over the next 6 –12 months. During the months of July, August and September, HUD was able to reduce its back log of applications by 10%, and if that pace continues, reaching a point of processing applications in 60 days or less on a consistent basis will take about one year. For more information about HUD’s Breaking Ground Initiative and the schedule of field offices for its release, click here.
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Construction starts of seniors housing and nursing care facilities are up over last year, but still remain well below the pre-recession peaks hit in 2008, according to a new industry report.

A total of 39,070 units were under construction at the end of March 2011, according to the Seniors Housing Construction Trends Report 2011. The units are distributed among 320 new properties and 146 expansions of existing properties. About half of the units are in seniors apartments, largely made up of subsidized buildings.

Construction of seniors housing, composed mostly of market-rate independent, assisted living and nursing care buildings, was up 55 percent year-over-year to 14,942 units. That total is still down 36.9 percent from the peak of more than 23,000 units in the year ending in March 2008.

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