Forget Manhattan. San Francisco is nearly at a saturation point. Real estate investors in the know—particularly foreign investors—are all betting their bottom dollars on one of the fastest growing real estate markets in the United States: Texas.
The Texas market is growing, affordable, and is considered “highly livable,” with sixteen Texan towns making WalletHub’s top 150 list of family-friendly US cities.
Cities like Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and even Dallas-Forth Worth are experiencing an unabated boom in construction and home prices, with vacancy rates so low they’d make any property manager swoon. Houston home prices shot up nearly 8 percent the past year, and Zillow predicts another 4.3 percent rise in 2016. In apartment construction, Dallas-Forth Worth is the leading city in the nation, having built nearly 40,000 units in 2015 alone. Even against this wave of construction, Dallas rents continue to rise against a vacancy rent of less than 5 percent, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Just like in other fast-growing markets, it becomes increasingly important that real estate owners and property managers utilize database-driven software to help manage their assets and remain as competitive as possible. Systems like Yardi, MRI, and Texas-based RealPage can give property managers in these fast growing Texas towns the competitive edge they need to ride the real estate wave and come out on top.
How can software help?
In competitive markets, like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York, savvy Texas real estate owners attract and retain tenants with easy-to-use tenant portals to help manage leases, showcase their units, and more.
Property owners in some parts of Texas—as well as their neighbors in Oklahoma—now also find themselves within the boundaries of the US Geological Services’ newly released “Seismic Hazard Forecast,” which reported that these areas are now as likely or even more likely to experience an earthquake as California. It won’t be long before Texan property managers, like their counterparts on the west coast, will be required to undertake seismic retrofitting—a task that Yardi, for instance, can help you manage and keep under control.
As multifamily housing continues its unremitting trend in cities across Texas, software designed for multifamily property management—such as the multifamily platforms offered by Yardi, RealPage, or MRI—will become increasingly necessary as the market grows more competitive.
Lastly, but crucially, cutting-edge real estate technology software can also help Texas real estate investors stay ahead of the market trends. They allow for near-, real-time comps in the neighborhood for each of your vacant units, so that you are guaranteeing the most effective and fair market-rate at the time of your new signing.
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It’s true what they say: everything really is bigger in Texas. These days, that adage applies to the potential for the Texas real estate market to make a considerable boost to your real estate asset portfolio, particularly if you’ve got the right technology to help you manage it.
