Future Bright For San Antonio Apartments

SAN ANTONIO, TX - The outlook for San Antonio's multifamily housing market is positive, according to Hendricks and Partners Inc.'s 2008 Apartment Update. In other words, what should be up is up. What should be down is down. For the 12 months ended June 30, 2008, San Antonio recorded a 2 percent employment growth rate. By comparison, the national growth rate fell 0.1 percent over the same time period.

While the hospitality and leisure sectors continue to create new jobs in the Alamo City, the market is also seeing a rising demand for skilled accounting and finance professionals, Phoenix-based Hendricks and Partners states in its report. Helping to spur the latter is the expansion of high-tech firms in San Antonio, such as Microsoft Corp. Expansion plans recently announced by locally based Southwest Business Corp. (SWBC) also bode well for the financial industry. The local job growth, in turn, is fueling the demand for multifamily housing.

Hendricks and Partners is one of the largest real estate firms focused solely on the sale of multifamily properties. At the end of the second quarter of 2008, the local apartment market recorded a vacancy rate of 6.6 percent, down from a rate of 7 percent as of the second quarter of 2007. The average rental rate, meanwhile, was up $19 on a year over year basis, going from $655 per month as of June 30, 2007, to an average of $674 a year later, Hendricks and Partners reports.

While ATT's move of its corporate headquarters from the Alamo City to Dallas does take some of the wind out of the economic sails of San Antonio, the city still has a good story to tell. Some big-money construction projects highlighted in the latest Hendricks and Partners report include a new 10-year, $635 million capital improvement project that was kicked off in June at the San Antonio International Airport.

San Antonio is also expected to see a windfall as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) construction push, to the tune of some 6 million square feet of development and more than $2 billion worth of construction related spending. Another plus for San Antonio is the recent Forbes magazine report stating that San Antonio is the second most recession proof city in the nation.