Looking for a good investment? Some folks are going back to the future.
“There was a huge craze,” said Larry Leitzman, a Tampa-based research and marketing coordinator at Grubb & Ellis, a national real estate agency. “Everybody was taking apartment buildings and converting them to condos. A lot of them are reeling them back in and taking the apartments that didn’t sell and converting them back to rentals.”
Before you call your broker, maybe you ought to call a real estate agent.
Now, I'm sure this is limited to select areas, but it looks like the law of supply and demand is at it again.
“It wasn’t a flip, more of a long-term investment,” said (Ted) Charron, an information technology director who works in nearby St. Petersburg. “Because there are so many of these conversions, there’s just not a lot of places to rent, so I think the demand for rentals is actually going to go up.”
Hmmm. Guess a full rental is better than an empty condo.
Growing demand for rentals stems from many factors. Buyers are finding the market less affordable, leading to fewer sales and a greater pool of renters. And conversion of condos took rental inventory off the market. Now that demand for condos has cooled, conversions are slowing and in some instances, condos revert back to rentals.
Looks like what once was old is new again. Should be fun to watch.
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