Community Values

>>With apartment occupancy rates ranging from about 78 percent to 86 percent in Southwest Florida, landlords have been lowering rents and offering such incentives as rent-free months to get people in the door. Once the rate exceeds 90 percent, renters can expect increases and fewer deals.

The decline of the building industry is partly to blame for the vacancies, as construction workers have left the area. “There’s a whole segment of the population that has migrated away,” says Jamie B. May, senior director of the National Multi Housing Group at Marcus & Millichap, which bills itself as the nation’s largest commercial real estate investmentservices firm.

Real-estate speculators have also played a role. Many of the condos, townhouses and single-family homes they hoped to flip became rentals in competition with apartment complexes. So landlords of all stripes got aggressive with rents, and when tenants saw they could, in some cases, rent a new, single-family home for about as much as an apartment, many chose the home. But then the foreclosure crisis swept the area, and although that’s certainly hurting the local housing market and economy, it’s good news in the apartment market.

“We’re seeing people who had lived in apartments before moving back into apartments, maybe because their home purchase failed or the house they were renting from an investor failed and they had to move out,” says Jim Garinger, principal and managing director in the Fort Myers office of Colliers Arnold Commercial Real Estate Services, which tracks the performance of the local apartment market for its investors. “They think, ‘I don’t want to have to go through this again,’ so they move back into an apartment complex.”