Corporate in-migration into the Sun Belt has picked up steam again as the largest office landlord in Metro Atlanta reports it has more than 1M SF in the pipeline in potential lease deals. 

The Atlanta skyline

Cousins Properties CEO Colin Connolly said his firm has seen a “significant uptick in relocation activities” from companies looking to move to Sun Belt markets. They are choosing to do so, in part, because of the threat of new personal and business tax proposals in states like California, New York and Washington, he said.

Recent business headlines seem to strengthen Connolly’s assertion of a Sun Belt revival. 

Starbucks announced in April it was opening a $100M regional headquarters in Nashville. It was reported in late March that financial giant Apollo is seeking a Southeast headquarters, with a focus on Austin, Nashville and South Florida. And asset management firm Capital Group announced last month it was spearheading a $60M East Coast office hub in Charlotte. 

Locally, Yamaha Motor Co. announced it was moving its headquarters from California — where it’s been for nearly 50 years — to Kennesaw, north of Atlanta. 

In the first quarter of this year, office landlords tallied their first positive absorption since the end of 2022, with AT&T and KPMG grabbing big chunks of office space. 

Cousins inked 49 office leases totaling 932K SF in the first quarter, with 52% of those being new and expanded leases, Executive Vice President Richard Hickson said. 

In Metro Atlanta, Cousins leased 192K SF in the first quarter, including KPMG’s new 105K SF lease at the Proscenium in Midtown. It also facilitated CallRail’s 46K SF deal at 725 Ponce in April.

“We believe that we are still in the early innings of this migration trend and expect these announcements to continue,” Connolly said during an April 30 earnings call.

Connolly’s comments echoed the optimism expressed by other publicly traded REIT leaders about the Metro Atlanta commercial real estate market. 

Piedmont Realty Trust Inc. tallied Atlanta as its second most-active office leasing market, securing 12 deals for 88K SF in Q1 2026, Piedmont Executive Vice President George Wells said during a May 1 earnings call. 

Despite this activity, Cousins posted a net loss of nearly $25M for the quarter, down from net income of $20.9M in Q1 2025, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. 

Cousins attributed the loss to a more than $36M impairment loss over the pending sale of One Eleven Congress, a 30-story office tower in Austin. That deal is expected to be consummated in the third quarter.

During the same period, though, Cousins’ rental income climbed nearly 7.5% quarter-over-quarter from $243M to $261.1M. 

Piedmont also posted a net loss of $12.9M for the quarter, up from a loss of $10M year-over-year, according to SEC filings. This was attributed mainly to higher depreciation expense from finished improvements.

Despite the net income loss and the coming loss of two big Piedmont tenants, the firm remained upbeat about re-leasing space in the coming months, especially with a backlog of early proposals and fewer big blocks of space remaining available in key submarkets, Wells said. 

For example, Piedmont has about 300K SF of prospective tenant proposals in the pipeline to help backfill the loss of the two large tenants in Central Perimeter, he said. Wells said the REIT is well-positioned in that submarket.

“One of the advantages here is that when you look at the supply of large block space for 150K SF or larger, there’s only four that really we would call the Tier One, and we own two out of four of those,” Wells said. “So we feel pretty good about that.”

Cousins’ Connolly also said Buckhead — one of the toniest submarkets in Metro Atlanta — is nearing a point where new construction could be justified. The firm has previously announced its intentions of potentially adding office to Buckhead’s skyline.

While the delta between asking rents in Buckhead — between $50 to $60 per SF — and new construction costs of around $90 per SF remains prohibitive, Connolly said the lack of available office space is making the prospect of new construction more likely.

“I use kind of one example where I’m sitting today in the Buckhead submarket of Atlanta,” he said. “If a user today needed 100K SF or had a 100K SF requirement in what I would characterize as a trophy lifestyle office building, they have exactly zero options.”

As head of Newmark’s student housing team, Ryan Lang brings years of experience with institutional, public and private investors to the conversation. He’s seen this property type rebound strongly from an uncertain future during the pandemic, when it seemed as though remote learning would eliminate the need to be on or near campus. ApartmentBuildings.com caught up with Lang recently to assess the current state of the market.

Q: During the pandemic, when most colleges and universities conducted classes remotely, student housing was considered potentially obsolete. Plainly that long-term view was disproven by the sector’s recovery, but how did the pandemic influence the current market?

A: Things have changed pretty dramatically from 2020 to where we sit today. In 2020, it looked as if the world was ending in terms of student housing. Universities were uncertain about how to tackle the situation. You had kids living in their parents’ basement. And a lot of institutional appetite for the sector dried up in a pretty significant way. But we found there were some smart, prudent investors that invested through COVID, when student housing was probably at the absolute bottom, and were rewarded pretty handsomely over the past couple of years based upon how the fundamentals have bounced back.

For a year and a half to two years during 2020 and 2021, we saw enrollment down. But things became normalized in terms of enrollment and how groups handled on-campus and off-campus housing. Enrollment picked up dramatically and in a very significant way. This helped address a couple of issues that were on the minds of prospective investors. And one of them has been, how will online education possibilities disrupt the traditional college experience? And we found very quickly that students had no interest in taking classes from their home. They wanted to be around their friends. They wanted to be in class listening to an actual professor and getting real-time experience in group settings. We found that was true across the board.

Q: How do current market fundamentals (asking rents, pre-leasing levels and occupancy, pricing for investment sales) compare to historic highs?

A: The 2023 academic year was the best recorded year on record by a long shot. Average rents were up double digits across the board, and you had pre-leasing at its fastest clip on record. For 2024, we’re not quite to the same level in terms of average rates. But if you compare it to pre-COVID levels, normalized levels, we’re still far above, from both an occupancy and rental rate perspective, where we’ve ever been in the student housing space.

Q: How does this compare to current fundamentals for the broader apartment market?

A: You have just under $70 billion worth of capital allocated to the alternative asset classes right now. Roughly 90% of that capital is allocated toward student housing, self-storage and healthcare-related product. You’re seeing that because of how the fundamentals of student housing hold up not only to other asset classes, but specifically to multifamily. In conventional multifamily, rents across the country are mostly flat. In student housing, you’re seeing high single-digit effective rent growth across the country. And you’re likely going to see somewhere between 6% and 8% average effective rent growth for the 2025 academic year as well.

Q: Is the student housing market’s strength pretty broad-based, or is there a bifurcation in which properties near the most sought-after schools are considerably above average for pricing, rent growth, occupancy, etc.?

A: There’s no doubt that there’s a bit of a bifurcation between Tier One and Tier Two, particularly those universities and submarkets that did incredibly well this year in terms of double-digit or high single-digit effective rent growth. A lot of that has to do with supply demand fundamentals and enrollment growth. But if you look at the major public universities across the country, the vast majority performed exceptionally well. If you look at the Ivy League and some of the top tier academic institutions across the country, again, the vast majority performed exceptionally well. Where you tend to see the drop-off right now are smaller schools that are sub-20,000 enrolled and don’t have a renowned academic institution name behind them.

Q: Are you seeing a lot of new faces among student housing investors or are they people who have been doing this for a while?

A: It’s both. But I think the biggest story is definitely the appetite from new equity that’s looking to scale up in the sector. They see that there’s still some capital markets dislocation and multiple opportunities to partner with great sponsors who have been in the space for a long time, sometimes via recapitalizations.

Q: What advice would you provide to inexperienced investors?

A: Find a great partner to joint venture with. If you can find a way to get a great sponsor that truly understands the operational differences in student housing versus apartments, it makes all the difference in the world.

To read the full version of this story, visit ApartmentBuildings.com.

NYC office demand has decreased 22% since March, equivalent to 3 million square feet, but it is still above the 2021-2023 monthly average, according to the latest data from VTS.  

Small tenants (<10k square feet) have shown positive momentum, while the tech and legal sectors experienced declines. The average size of tenants rolling in for 2027-2028 is larger than those rolling in near term (2025-2026). Trophy assets saw the biggest rent increase in April, followed by Class A and Class B properties. 

Institutional investors, including Boston Properties, Brookfield, Blackstone, and others, are signaling a shift towards capital deployment this year. VTS’ Leasing Prediction Outlook for 2024 suggests a 17% increase in leasing compared to 2023. 

The medical office market in the Tri-State New York metro area, encompassing NYC, NJ, CT, and Long Island, displays diversity, with strong demand and unique structural characteristics in each locality, according to JLL’s TriState medical office report. 

In Manhattan, medical offices are typically situated within mixed-use buildings, offering convenience in the bustling urban landscape. Conversely, the Outer Boroughs feature a combination of spaces in mixed-use and standalone buildings, primarily in less densely populated neighborhoods. Manhattan commands higher rents due to its central location and density, while less dense areas provide more affordable alternatives. 

Furthermore, with individuals over the age of 55 constituting 30% of the U.S. population and the elderly population aged 80 and above expected to grow by 50% within the decade, there is a projected significant increase in demand for outpatient healthcare services. In the Tri-State area alone, outpatient demand is anticipated to grow by 6-10% over the next five years across much of the region. 

Houston is among several U.S. metros expected to see a significant drop-off in migration for at least the next year, as the city continues to experience large job losses brought on by the combination of the coronavirus pandemic and low crude oil prices.

Prior to the pandemic, certain markets with lower costs of living like Houston, Phoenix, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Atlanta were experiencing significant population growth, correlating with strong job growth. 

That trend could reset in the next year or two, as more expensive, weak-growth markets with highly educated populations may retain and attract more workers, according to new research from CoStar.

CoStar Managing Consultant Andrew Rybczynski told Bisnow that subdued population growth would mean rising vacancy rates in Houston’s multifamily sector, inevitably leading to a slower pipeline.

“Projects that are underway are particularly vulnerable, as they are likely seeing their construction timeline stretched and will probably deliver into a weak demand environment,” Rybczynski said.

“Twenty-five thousand units are underway in Houston right now compared to less than 10,000 in the fourth quarter of 2017. There’s a good chance that units underway number drops down by significant amounts again.”

From 2012 to 2016, year-over-year population growth in Houston ranged from 2% to 2.7%, according to Oxford Economics data. But since Q4 2016, year-over-year population growth has never exceeded 1.8%, and dipped as low as 1.2% in early 2018, Rybczynski said.

That growth recovered to 1.7% in Q1 2020, but given the massive loss of employment across all sectors, it’s likely that there will be lower population growth figures, he added.

Houston consistently ranks toward the top of large markets in terms of growth. Even when Houston is growing slowly — by Houston standards — it still grows quickly in relation to other large metros.

“We expect Houston’s growth to slow through this down cycle, but for it to maintain strong growth compared to other large metros like Los Angeles, New York or Chicago,” Rybczynski said.

It is likely that Houston will still continue to enjoy net in-migration, even if the growth slows. More people were looking to move to Houston between Jan. 1 and April 15 than to leave, according to the latest renter migration report from Apartment List.