5 at 5: Your Daily Digest for Real Estate Investing, 1/25/21
Sun Belt and Mountain West are where it is, big house building guys dominate, AMC is stepping off the sidelines, why and which REITs should rally and how to convert a mall into apartments.
In today’s news
Forget city versus suburbs. Everything revolves around the sun belt and the mountain west
In a new report, JLL (NYSE: JLL) predicts that business moves to suburbs will remain limited in 2021 and that top occupiers are unlikely to need to choose an all-urban or suburban strategy when analyzing talent demand and space requirements. The real winners over the next 36 months will be the Sun Belt and Mountain West sub-markets.
Why It Matters: GlobeSt.com highlights highlights from the report, including San Francisco to Austin as the most popular migration route that can help real estate investors think about where to put their money.
Top 10 Builder Share tops 30% for the second year in a row
According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the top 10 builders recorded 30.4% of new single family home closings in 2019.
Why It Matters: The share of big names in the housing market has been increasing for 30 years, and many of those leaders are public companies that deserve a look at housing from investors during these troubled times.
Today on Millionacres
AMC avoids bankruptcy again: can it get stuck?
AMC Entertainment (NYSE: AMC) scraped together an additional $ 713 million, bringing the grand total to $ 917 million and avoiding bankruptcy.
Why It Matters: AMC is one of the largest movie theater operators in the country and a primary tenant in the commercial properties the theater lives in. Staying afloat long enough to see if a pandemic can revive the movie business would help many real estate mutual funds (REITs) and other real estate investors.
3 things REIT investors should know in 2021
Mainly due to the pandemic, the average REIT achieved a total return of around minus 6% in 2020. However, 2021 could be a much better year for the sector. That’s because many of the headwinds REITs face should ease in the coming months.
Why it matters: Matt Frankel from Millionacres determines which sectors and which players in these segments are positioned to weather a recovery from the pandemic particularly well.
PREIT to transform mall into apartments: will others follow suit?
PREIT (NYSE: PEI) has received approval following its bankruptcy to continue development of over 1,000 residential units on Moorestown Mall in southern New Jersey. The question is: will more mall operators try to follow PREIT’s example?
Why It Matters: Millionacres’s Maurie Backman shares some pros and cons of the strategy, but notes that apartments are better than empty space if they’re just sitting there, at a time when the future of such brick and mortar retail is particularly bleak looks like.