April 2007 Table of Contents

Developing housing for residents stuck on the bottom rung of the homeless ladder is not easy. Single-room occupancy housing, commonly known as SRO housing, is riddled with financial, infrastructural, and operational challenges, but SRO developers across the country say it is a necessary headache to house a population that would otherwise be lost to the streets. Read more

After five years of condo craziness, reality has returned to South Florida. Just ask Harvey Hernandez. “We were living in a marketplace that wasn't real. It's not real to sell a 400-unit project in a weekend,” says Hernandez, president of H&H Development, based in Coral Gables, Fla. “I think we're changing and becoming more real.” So is the South Florida multifamily market. At its 2005 peak, sales of existing condominiums reached 34,820 in the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach/Boca Raton markets, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. But by 2006, sales had tumbled more than 20 percent, to 27,328 units. Read more

Looking for a company that can handle a tough job? The John Stewart Co. never turns down a challenge. In August 2005, the affordable housing firm signed on to redevelop a dilapidated San Francisco public housing project despite a major roadblock: a missing check from the federal government in the amount of approximately $30 million. Read more

Money, money, money. For the past three years, the ever-growing flow of capital has been all the talk among apartment executives, investors, brokers, and industry-watchers. The conversation was no different at this year's MFE Leadership Summit, held March 15-17 in Vail, Colo. Read more

Multifamily completions maintain an even keel at the end of '06. Read more

Residents who skip payments, write bad checks, leave significant damage, and commit other infractions cost multifamily companies nearly $5 billion a year. Read more

Choose the right hues. Read more

A picture is worth a thousand words—or better yet, a thousand dollars. To help buyers visualize the sweeping views from their future condos, the Atlanta-based Novare Group photographs the views from various building heights and showcases these images throughout sales centers, model units, project Web sites, and ad campaigns. Read more

People notice when J. Ronald Terwilliger, one of the best-known executives in the multifamily industry, champions a cause. So Terwilliger turned heads when he recently put his money where his mouth is: Instead of just talking about the serious need for workforce housing, he gave millions of his own dollars to the Urban Land Institute to create a center for workforce housing. Read more

Denver's multifamily housing market missed out on the boom times seen recently in much of the West. But no other city seems to reinvent itself every few years quite the way that Denver does, and big municipal investments focusing on infrastructure and economic development groundwork appear to have the area poised for another period of sustained expansion. Read more

More and more recent immigrants, first-time renters, recently widowed or divorced spouses, and others with little or no financial history are seeking housing. And with each skip and bad-debt eviction costing anywhere from $3,500 to $4,500, identifying who's worth the risk and who isn't has serious bottom-line implications. Read more

Brad Broyhill wants to grow the value of Simpson Housing's portfolio. Read more

Building multifamily residences above shops and businesses has been known to revitalize downtown areas, so Chicago-based developer General Growth Properties is trying a suburban version in Natick, Mass. Read more

Botanica on the Green has established quite a reputation for its untraditional approach to multifamily residential living. The 232-unit apartment project nestled in Denver is being hailed as a “New Urbanist fantasy” and an “outdoor oasis in the city.” Read more

It's not every day that a legislative change in a country on the other side of the globe has an impact on domestic real estate. But that's exactly what happened on May 18, 2006, when the government of South Korea raised the ceiling on investment in U.S. residential property from $300,000 to $1 million. As luck would have it, 100 of the 238 apartments at The Mercury, a $120 million adaptive reuse project in the Koreatown section of downtown Los Angeles, were scheduled to go on sale just two days later. Read more

A few years ago, multifamily executives wondered how long it would take for online leasing to catch on. Now that it has, some apartment firms are ready to take the next step: eliminating the paper lease. That would mean that even when customers come into the leasing office, they wouldn't have to put pen to paper on a printed contract. Read more

Trying to decide whether it's worth using energy-efficient appliances at your community? Consider this: If every household in the United States used a Whirlpool-brand Duet or Ensemble washing machine, the country would save approximately 1.4 trillion gallons of water per year, according to Whirlpool Corp. It's hard to say no to that. The environmental impact is huge—and so are the potential water bill savings. Read more

During the 1890s, the Sharples Separator Works was the cool place to work. The sprawling five-acre facility—located in West Chester, Pa., about 30 miles west of Philadelphia—was the home of the dairy industry's first tubular cream separator. The production plant churned out a good amount of cream products for Chester County dairy farmers, so thousands of workers were hired to handle the company's growing business. Read more