Recently I represented a tenant for a downtown rental. In doing so I got an education in the downtown apartment market. Downtown Austin is/was known for its recent addition & occupancy of several new high rise condos and with more to come.

What did escape my attention were the new apartments: the Monarch, Legacy & Ashton that were also opened. What a surprise when I found some of those buildings with over 95% occupancy rates. This coupled with rents averaging $2000 for a one bed/one bath apartment that got me to thinking about pent up demand.

While lenders have all but disappeared and mortgages are hard to come by, condo loans are all but non existent except for those with 20-25% down. Qualifying for single family home loans while stringent is still achievable with 5-10% down. So this means a lot of new renters downtown that may eventually want to buy.

When qualifying for a condo mortgages does improve there may be some latent demand. This will not signal the start of a new speculative era of real estate but may show steady growth in the medium priced downtown condos in the coming years.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 11:02 am and is filed under Downtown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.