Chicago-based Core Spaces has closed on construction financing for ōLiv Columbia and officially broken ground on the 2,352-bed mixed-use development, located at 1401 Main St. in Columbia, SC. Affiliates of Apollo provided construction financing; Newmark assisted in the debt financing and Juneau Construction Company serves as general contractor. Summer 2028 delivery is projected.

ōLiv Columbia will feature two towers: a 26-story market-rate apartment tower and a 22-story student housing tower, with a total of 723 units and 2,352 beds. The project will also offer more than 2,140 square feet of retail space and a 1,600-stall parking garage to enhance street-level activity and support
Columbia’s long-term vision for a dynamic Main Street District.

“This is an exciting milestone for ōLiv Columbia, a development that will not only bring more housing downtown but also revitalize the Main Street corridor,” said Austin Pagnotta, director of acquisitions at Core Spaces. The project marks Core’s second development in Columbia, following Hub Columbia at 1426 Main St. in 2014.

The James of Irvine, a luxury senior living community, recently celebrated its groundbreaking, marking a milestone for what’s reportedly the area’s first upscale rental-based senior community. The event, held at the 3.03-acre site on Gates Avenue, drew more than 80 attendees, including city officials, developers and industry leaders.

Designed for baby boomer renters, The James will feature 350 studio, one- and two-bedroom residences for independent living, assisted living and memory care. The eight-story community, set to open in summer 2027, will offer modern amenities, holistic care and a walkable lifestyle in Orange County, with convenient access to Santa Ana, Costa Mesa and Tustin.

Owned by the P3 Foundation, The James is being developed by Harbert South Bay Partners and will be managed by Momentum Senior Living. Additional project partners include Van Tilburg, Banvard & Soderbergh, Rodrigo Vargas Design and W.E. O’Neil Construction.

Thursday, March 20: Be there to learn from and network with the experts from Gantry, CBRE, Wonderful Real Estate, RETS Associates, BKM Capital Partners, Thorofare Capital, Kidder Mathews, Buchanan Street Partners, and many more on March 20^th at the 9^th annual Connect Orange County conference. Don’t miss out on the industry’s most insightful Orange County CRE event of 2025. Be sure to register in advance; registration pricing increases on event day. www.ConnectOC2025.com

American Lions, a joint venture between Fetner Properties and Lions Group, has launched leasing at The Italic, a 50-story residential tower located at 26-32 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City. The Italic is the sister building of The Bold, located across the street.

“This evolving neighborhood has shown tremendous growth, and we’re excited to contribute to that by adding more high-quality housing,” said Hal Fetner, president and CEO of Fetner Properties.

The Italic’s 363 rental apartments range from studios to three-bedrooms. Of these, 109 units are designated as affordable. The building also includes 20,000 square feet of commercial space and offers direct access to Court Square subway station.

Amenities at the property include a communal lounge, a fitness center, two bay golf simulators, a basketball court, coworking spaces and a rooftop terrace with panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline. A standalone feature is the building’s full demonstration cooking kitchen.

Just under 1 in 10 homes that broke ground in the United States in 2024 was being built for a tenant, not an owner, according to John Burns Research and Consulting data. 

Single-family rentals accounted for more than 1 in 4 rental unit construction starts in 2024.

Investors poured a combined $57B into single-family rentals in 2021 and 2022. Capital flows slowed in 2023 as rising interest rates squeezed deals, but the sector bounced back, with investment nearly doubling year-over-year to $6.3B in 2024. Analysts expect more growth ahead. 

“This niche is only 6, 7 or 8 years old, but it gained a ton of traction, not only on the demand side from tenants moving into a purpose-built rental community but also on the development side,” said Chris Nebenzahl, vice president of rental research at John Burns. “Developers have seen that demand and have really met the demand.”

Single-family rentals have exploded into the housing market, with 124,825 new rental homes built since 2017. Unit completions have grown in each of the last six years, and 2024 set the new high-water mark for deliveries with more than 34,000 units, according to Point2Homes data, an SFR leasing platform and subsidiary of Yardi Matrix. 

Private equity continues to pour money into the sector to take advantage of macroeconomic and cultural shifts that have made renting more attractive. Persistently high home prices, exacerbated in the last two years by elevated interest rates, have contributed to the sector’s success.

Single-family build-to-rent homes accounted for 27% of all rental housing starts last year, and SFRs accounted for 9% of all single-family housing starts, according to John Burns. 

“Institutional investors are increasingly favoring purpose-built developments over acquisitions, further boosting the growth of SFR/BTR properties,” Doug Ressler, manager of business intelligence at Yardi Matrix, wrote in an email. 

New SFR construction was up 41% year-over-year in 2024 even as traditional housing starts fell by 2%, according to John Burns. A quarter of the SFR developers, operators and investors surveyed by the research firm expect to break ground on more units this year compared to last. 

Today, it is cheaper to rent than to buy in all of the country’s 50 top metros, with the median mortgage priced around $2,703 per month, while rent in a comparable city is around $1,979 per month, according to Bankrate. Homeowners, unlike renters, also have to contend with property taxes, insurance and repair bills. 

Renting becomes even more attractive when factoring in that 30-year mortgage rates are floating between 6% and 7%, up from the sub-3% rates that were common before the Federal Reserve tightening policy in 2022. 

“It’s still expensive, and we’re waiting for our incomes to come up, but you don’t hear that many complaints about rents anymore. But you’re hearing more about home prices, and that’s because home prices have continued to go up,” said Ken Johnson, a housing economist and the real estate chair at the University of Mississippi.

Homebuyers look at today’s prices and sense that the market is near a peak, giving them more reason to hold off on closing a sale, he said. There are signs that Wall Street investors agree.

The stocks of Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, the two largest public SFR firms, are trading somewhere between a 20% and 35% discount on their net asset values, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

Invitation Homes has been trading at a discount since early 2022, but the gap has widened by 10 percentage points over the last 12 months. With home prices elevated, large institutional investors that own more than 1,000 homes accounted for just 0.3% of U.S. home purchases in the third quarter, according to Point2Homes. 

Sun Belt markets have drawn the bulk of investment in the last five years, after the pandemic provided a burst of energy to existing migration trends driving Americans south. 

Nearly 4,300 new build-to-rent homes broke ground in Phoenix in 2024, the most of any major city. It was followed by Atlanta, which saw 3,236 units break ground, Dallas, Houston and Charlotte. Since 2017, developers have broken ground on 42,000 single-family rentals across those five cities alone. 

“The concept is going to be most effective in large metropolitan areas that are growing,” Johnson said, highlighting cities with large populations of young professionals.

But SFR owners and developers have found themselves in regulatory crosshairs in recent years as the nation’s housing affordability crisis deepens.

Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission under former President Joe Biden, took a parting shot at SFR providers in the waning days before President Donald Trump took over the White House. 

The FTC issued a mid-January request for public comment seeking input about how the federal watchdog could probe SFR operators and their impact on the housing market. The investigation would target at least 30 firms, each of which owned at least 1,000 rental units, the FTC said. 

“This proposed study would shed much-needed light on the mega-investors that have amassed huge portfolios of single-family rental units and potentially contributed to the housing challenges that Americans face,” Khan said in a statement at the time. 

FTC commissioners unanimously approved the notice, but it is unclear whether Trump’s nominee to replace Khan, Andrew Ferguson, will follow through with a probe. 

Private equity’s interest in housing has drawn scrutiny for years, including a 2022 ProPublica investigation that found the investment firms were behind 85% of Freddie Mac’s largest apartment deals since 2013.

Earlier this year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed blocking hedge funds and private equity firms from buying up large numbers of homes in the state. Similar proposals have been floated in Nevada and Minnesota. 

Analysts who spoke to Bisnow said private equity’s interest in single-family housing was a positive development for housing affordability. The build-to-rent communities popping up across the country are a supplement to housing options rather than a replacement, they said. 

It takes tens of millions of dollars in upfront investment to build homes for rent, and the cash has to come from somewhere, Johnson said. 

“We see politicians saying that we don’t need Wall Street or private equity in the rental market or building homes for ownership. That’s a prescription for disaster,” he said. “I don’t hear people saying we don’t need professional investors in the stock market. People that know what they’re doing create price efficiency and liquidity in the housing market.”

The Vestcor Cos is hoping to build The Lofts at Southbank in Jacksonville, a $38.8 million project that will consist of 100 apartment units, 80 of which will be reserved for renters making 60% of the area’s annual median income. All the units will be rented to people making less than 120% of the area’s annual median income.

Vestcor is seeking $20 million from the state and tax credit equity to develop the property. It’s also asking the Downtown Investment Authority for $600,000 to help it secure the tax credits it applies for.

The ground floor will be retail and garage space. The second floor will be for resident parking, and there will be four floors of storage and four floors of residential.

Vestcor has five affordable residential communities in the Central Business District of downtown. It also has projects in the works in San Marco East (photo) and the Cathedral District.

Register today for Connect Phoenix Multifamily & Single-Family Build-to-Rent, scheduled for April 18 at the Westin Kierland Resort & Spa, Scottsdale, AZ.

Another out-of-town firm is targeting the Metro Atlanta area’s burgeoning build-to-rent housing sector, where developers take single-family homes and townhouses and operate them like apartment communities. 

Courtesy of Haven Realty Capital

Queen City Townes in Charlotte, one of the three communities that Haven Realty Capital purchased for its build-to-rent platform.

California-based Haven Realty Capital recently purchased two neighborhoods under development in Metro Atlanta to turn them into rental campuses: Stapleton Park in McDonough, which includes 76 Craftsman-style single-family houses, and Rosemary Park at Sugarloaf, a 78-unit townhome community in Lawrenceville. Haven also purchased Queen City Townes, a 106-unit rental townhouse community in Charlotte. The combined purchase of all three properties totaled $80M, according to a press release.

Since October, Haven has spent $500M on 1,500 homes in 17 communities in Georgia, the Carolinas, Arizona and Illinois. Haven’s model is to contract with homebuilders at the outset of construction and close on the homes once they deliver, it said in the press release.

Haven is another player coming to invest in the build-to-rent market in Metro Atlanta. While not a new segment of the real estate industry — for years, investors purchased houses to offer for rent — the market was mainly dominated by smaller investors who owned portfolios of single-family and townhouses scattered around the region.

Now there is an influx of more well-heeled institutional and bigger multifamily and housing developers like JPMorgan Chase, Invesco Real Estate, Blackstone Group, Lennar Corp., D.R. Horton and Toll Brothers buying or developing more traditional suburban neighborhoods, maintaining ownership and renting them out.

Earlier this year, Atlanta-based Crescent Communities, known for developing and operating its NOVEL luxury apartment brand, formed a joint venture with the DRB Group to develop single-family and townhouse build-to-rent communities across the Southeast.

And both Atlanta-based Kaplan Residential and RangeWater Real Estate announced plans recently to develop single-family and townhouse communities targeting renters as investors eye the metro area’s growing population along with climbing housing prices.

“It’s not like the old days when if you were renting a home, it was just because you couldn’t buy a home,” Haven Managing Principal Sudha Reddy said in an interview.

When Haven formed in 2010, the firm focused on buying single-family houses, fixing them up and then offering them for rental, Reddy said. But soon after, Haven shifted its strategy to investing in value-add apartment communities across the country. By 2019, the firm was eyeing a way to get back into the build-to-rent market, this time by amassing all the houses in a single neighborhood, Reddy said.

Haven entered the Metro Atlanta market in a big way last year when, in a partnership with Walton Street Capital, it purchased six neighborhoods with 537 single-family houses dedicated to renters from ResiBuilt Homes for $133.7M.

“The whole single-family rental demand, we were on the front end of seeing that demand over the past 10 years,” Reddy said.

While the build-to-rent market comprises 5% of new homes in the U.S., the segment is growing rapidly. A number of factors are fueling that demand, mostly centered on millennials, Reddy said. Now that they are having children, millennial households are becoming interested in schools and more space — characteristics more available in Metro Atlanta’s low-density suburbs — but either cannot afford to buy homes or don’t want to enter the ownership market.

“As homes get more expensive, you’ll just see more and more people remain in the renter pool,” Reddy said.

Homebuyers are encountering a market where demand has outstripped supply, causing housing prices to continue to escalate. Roughly 60% of all U.S. households are unable to afford the median-priced U.S. home of $346,577, according to the National Association of Home Builders. And for every $1K increase in a house’s price, another 154,000 households get priced out of homeownership.

The median price of a single-family home in Metro Atlanta has risen from $245K to $352K over the past 15 years, according to data compiled by the residential brokerage firm Engel & Volkers. Median housing prices climbed more than 25% year-over-year in June, according to the Atlanta Realtors Association.

Haven plans to focus on for-rent housing, instead of buying and fixing up apartment communities for the time being. Reddy said the prices investors have to pay for value-add multifamily properties, especially with cap rates as low as they are today, doesn’t give much room for error.

“Because we believe this segment of the market has better risk-adjusted returns, we have been less focused on multifamily as of late,” Reddy said. “We want to aggregate as many of these communities as possible.”