The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.
For those looking for pandemic or recession resistant strategies, it pays to look into multi-family, industrial, and suburban office. For multi-family, this has been a mainstay for the better part of two decades for developers and investors, industrial works to usher in the e-commerce trend taking over retail, and suburban office is a new trend that shows how professionals are prioritizing more intimate office spaces compared to huge skyscrapers.
What are some pandemic resistant or recession resistant real investment strategies? You know, at CA South Development, Richard, we’ve been focusing very heavily on multi-family and industrial. And I think those two asset classes seem to be the ones that are going to fare the best because of the Amazon effect, because of e-commerce, because of – industrial is just hot and there’s just so much movement from retail to industrial in order to support all those goods that are being shipped and purchased online. All those things need to be stored in last mile distribution facilities, so that’s a play that we’ve been very aggressive at developing in and around Nashville. Multi-family, of course, is the darling. Everybody loves multi-family, everybody has loved multi-family for 20 years so there’s nothing new there. That you just have to be really careful about it not getting overbuilt. So, if everybody loves an asset class they tend to build more of it than is maybe justified to the market, so you just have to be careful there. But other than that, I would say that those are the ones likely to be recession resistant. As well as, surprisingly, suburban office. Suburban office, like low-rise office buildings, anecdotally from what I’m hearing from brokers are becoming more and more popular. So people don’t want to be in a super tall skyscraper office building; they want to be in a 2 or 3 story office building where they can walk up the stairs, or don’t have to share an elevator with a ton of people, that is also something else that I would definitely keep my eye on. I think it’s something very interesting, and I also think it’s something coincidentally we happen to be developing as well in a suburb of Nashville.