CDS Community Development Strategies

Last night at St. Arnold's Brewery near Downtown Houston, CDS released the latest edition of the Lot Price Survey. The event was well attended by representatives from the area's residential development industry. Beer and BBQ were served, and a presentation was given summarizing the latest trends and findings from the survey. For those who missed the presentation, you can watch it here.

​The Greater Houston Area Lot Price Survey is a semi-annual report published each April and September. The survey features detailed information on selected active single-family subdivisions throughout the Greater Houston Area.​ For more information, visit our Lot Price Survey info page. 

For a PDF copy of the event presentations, click on the links below:
Houston Area Lot Price Survey - Key Findings
TxDOT Houston Area Roadway Projects Briefing

Link to Article. PDF of Article.

CDS Community Development Strategies

CDS participated as a sponsor and exhibitor at the Urban Land Institute's 2016 Suburban Marketplace. For its booth, CDS went with an election year theme, and parodied several famous slogans from past and present campaigns. 

The event took place at the Waterway Marriott Hotel & Convention Center in The Woodlands Town Center, and consisted of several morning tours of nearby development, a lunch speaker, and two sessions with expert panels discussing current topics of interest. CDS has been a long time sponsor of the ULI, whose mission is to to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in building sustainable, thriving communities.​

Consider yourself a U.S. History / Politics buff? Try and guess the original campaigns which inspired the buttons below. 

Steve Spillette
CDS Community Development Strategies

​Much has been said recently about the relationship between Houston and the price of oil. While most agree that the local economy is more robust than it once was, many are still wondering just how big an impact low oil prices will have. One way to answer this question is to look at how the region was impacted by high oil prices in the recent past. The synopsis: it added over 100,000 six-figure income households—something future growth is not expected to duplicate any time soon. 

Brenda Crenshaw
CDS Community Development Strategies

If you're anything like me and my friends, you watch Tiny House Hunters on HGTV and wonder how someone could possibly fit their life into such a small space? Is it just my generation (Baby Boomers) who think you need at least 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms to survive? Is that because we shared bedrooms with siblings and want our children to have their own space? Or maybe we want big homes as a status symbol?   

​Millennials—those currently 19 to 34 years old (born 1981 to 1996)—have been a challenging demographic group for the home building industry to figure out. They’ve kept many wondering as to when and where they will finally decide to buy a home. 

​One major reason Millennials are acting differently has to do with finances. According to the New American Foundation, the average Millennial graduating with a bachelor’s degree has nearly $30k in student loans. This long-term burden of debt competes with other expenditures, and makes it harder to qualify for mortgages. Add fewer job opportunities (and job advances) to the mix and it’s not hard to understand why Millennials are living at home longer with parents, renting rather than buying, and putting off marriage and children. More than changing preferences—these are often sound financial choices. Eventually, Millennials will be buying homes, but they will do so at a lower rate than previous generations and on a delayed time schedule. 

Ty Jacobsen
CDS Community Development Strategies

For residents, the name of a neighborhood is usually a source of identity and pride. But for home builders and developers, it's often part of the marketing plan. Tabbed with their pleasant and descriptive monikers, single family subdivisions make up a large part of the American residential landscape. Sometimes when navigating that landscape, place names can seem a bit repetitive. This has been something we at CDS have noticed after compiling the Greater Houston Subdivision and Lot Price Survey for nearly 40 years now. In an attempt to measure just how common some names really are, we analyzed a list of over one thousand “active” subdivisions (actively selling homes) in the Houston area. Think you can guess the top ones? Take the quiz below. 

J. Kirby Snideman
CDS Community Development Strategies

Proponents of pedestrian friendly design often advocate for retail parking lots to be placed in the rear; behind retail buildings and away from roadways. Moving parking lots to the rear concentrates people and places along the street, creating an environment that is arguably more accessible, interesting, and safe for walkers and bicyclists. While this seems advantageous, retail developers are often opposed to this layout. This article examines a few reasons why. Understanding the concerns of retail developers will help community leaders and members find the best solutions for their community.

A non-local developer has undertaken plans to develop a high-rise tower of “micro-unit” condominiums in the emerging East Downtown area (formally known as the “EaDo District”) of Houston.  This project, named the Ivy Lofts, seeks to offer would-be home buyers an affordable option near Downtown and other urban core neighborhoods which have experienced a massive boom in popularity and development since 2000, along with significant home price appreciation.

PDF of the Presentation. Link to the Video.

​CDS President Steve Spillette recently spoke to members of the West Houston Leadership Institute, a group affiliated with the West Houston Chamber of Commerce. In this presentation, Mr. Spillette provided an overview of the latest demographic trends affecting Greater West Houston. He discussed recent population growth, employment activity, increasing ethnic diversity, and income trends, among other topics.

Click on the image below to watch the video on the CDS Youtube channel.

Reports of the death of the big American home have been greatly exaggerated. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the size of new American homes has been on the rise since hitting a low point in late 2009. In that year the median average fell to 2,159 square feet (SF), down from the pre-recession high of 2,295 SF in 2007. During that short period of decline, some pointed to the end of the big American home trend—citing the downsizing of baby boomers and the differing preferences of millennials. But since 2009, the median average home size in America has steadily increased. In 2014, the median average was 2,517 SF—a  17% increase since 2009 and a 60% increase since 1974.

​The Houston Business Journal reported on February 5, 2016 that The Kirby Collection, a $146 million mixed-use project in Houston's Upper Kirby is targeting boutique office tenants. 

The article quotes Jack Bousquet with Thor Equities’ (the developer) who states that he has received interest from law firms, real estate companies, brokers, and other small but high end office space users (link to article). According to Bousquet, Thor Equities has "...specifically designed this 13-story, 210,000 square foot Class A office building to attract a non-energy user." 

Last Thursday, Walmart ended its Walmart Express concept, shuttering all 102 such stores. Walmart announced earlier in January that they planned to close several underperforming stores across all of their formats, but it was the entirety of Walmart Express that made up the bulk of the planned closures. Despite that fact, the Walmart Express format meets a relatively quiet end, as discussion of Walmart store closures as an economic indicator largely drowned out discussion of the Express format itself. It is a format that deserves some further examination.

​In addition to having more dogs, households are spending more money on them. While the percentage of households owning a dog increased by roughly 6% from 2005 to 2015, total U.S. consumer spending on pets nearly doubled, going from just over 36 billion to a projected 60 billion over the same period. A significant portion of that pet spending is dog related.

Not only are the number of dog owning households increasing, but dog owners have become increasingly vocal. Jurisdictions around the country have been responsive. In the 100 largest cities the number of dog parks have increased from roughly 420 in 2005 to more than 650 in 2015, a 53% rise. 

CDS Community Development Strategies

Link to the video. PDF of the Presentation.

​CDS President Steve Spillette recently spoke to a group of graduate students in the Bauer Graduate Real Estate program at the University of Houston. Mr. Spillette has several years of experience in retail market analysis and multiple degrees related to real estate and planning--including an MBA from Texas A&M University. In addition, he has performed a variety of market studies and financial pro-forma analyses for both private and public clients related to single family and multifamily residential, office, industrial, hotel, meeting facilities, and golf, as well as significant public sector studies related to major investments and strategic initiatives.

In this presentation he details the process and method required to perform a credible retail market analysis. This type of analysis is often performed for commercial developers who want to gauge how successful their planned development will be.

Click on the image below to watch the video on the CDS Youtube channel.

Link to article. PDF of article.

The Houston-area housing market continued to weaken in December amid growing concerns about the regional economy, but it ended the year with a near-record number of home sales for all of 2015, a report shows.

Buyers closed on 73,724 single-family homes last year, falling just 2.4 percent short of the market's 2014 sales peak, the Houston Association of Realtors said Wednesday.

"We have to remember the housing market from 2012 through 2014 was really quite extraordinary. It was really an overheated market," said Steve Spillette, president of CDS Community Development Strategies, a market research and economic analysis firm based in Houston. "We were adding so many jobs, and we really couldn't catch up."

That said, he added, "the hiring boom that drove so much of that increase in population and households in our region, that's over."
​
The slowdown in housing began to take hold late last year. December marked the third straight month of year-over-year declines in single-family home sales.

​See the link for the full article.

Link to article. PDF of article.

HOUSTON – Few people can judge the lay of the land better than an urban planner. Steven Spillette, an urban development strategist also experienced in real estate and urban planning, has done a variety of market studies and financial pro-forma analyses for private and public clients related to single family and multifamily residential, retail, office, industrial, hotel and meeting facilities, among other things.

A native Houstonian, he was educated at UC Berkeley, Texas A&M and Stanford. He launched his own firm, Spillette Consulting, in 2001 and recently merged with CDS Market Research.

He shared some of his prognostications for 2016 with Dale King, a contributor to the Realty News Report.

Realty News Report: The price of oil dipped to its lowest level in seven years in December, a major concern to Houstonians. What’s your outlook for Houston real estate for 2016?

Spillette: Even though Houston’s economy is more diversified than it was 30 years ago, the recent surge in hiring was spearheaded by upstream gas and oil. This boom has stopped and some layoffs are happening. Construction sectors like multifamily, suburban single-family and Class A office space will be much weaker in the coming year. There will be little demand for large-scale office space. Rents will plateau. We don’t need any more upscale apartments in some parts of town. Other aspects of the economy independent of gas and oil seem relatively stable. The southeastern part of town which has other industries will also remain stable or will grow. That area won’t suffer as much as the petrochemical sector. Logistics tied to the Port of Houston and consumer products distribution is strong and should remain so. The things that primed the pump for the massive boom since 2011 have largely gone away. The multiplier effects will still be felt in 2016, but things won’t be crazy. I’d call them unremarkable.

See the link for the full article. 

Link to article.  PDF of article.

Houston's suburbs are among the outlying areas in the country grappling with changes as they adjust to becoming more than bedroom communities for major cities. 

To address some of these challenges, the Houston's branch of the Urban Land Institute and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rive University will study suburban Sun Belt communities and such consumer issues as climate and market demand. The groups, think tanks that study urban issues, will also study ways to make suburban community more sustainable, compact and walkable. 

The study will draw input from public officials, real estate developers, investors and financial professionals and planning experts to address questions, including how to help the communities survive ups and downs in the economy, how to attract and retain residents of all ages and avoid becoming obsolete and how to withstand the impacts of climate change. 

Groups helping the urban think tank with this project include CDS Market Research, Elmore Public Relations, Johnson Development Corp, TBG Partners, Walter P. Moore and 1216 Consulting.  At the ULI-Houston Surburban Marketplace COnference on April 7, 2016, the group will present a workshop on the study. The full report will be released in fall 2016.
Funding for the study comes from the ULI Foundation with matching funds from the local district council.

Link to article.  PDF of article.

As real estate becomes more valuable in Houston's urban core, a shrinking number of federally subsidized housing in these wealthier neighborhoods could threaten the economic diversity of people who live there...

Steve Spillette, a Houston-based urban development strategist with Community Development Strategies, said that as real estate values increase and neighborhoods become more affluent, they typically see reduced crime, have more desirable schools and attract more businesses. The employees who work there, however, might not be able to afford to live there.

He said affordable housing in Houston's core is decreasing and farther-out neighborhoods considered affordable often have the lower-performing schools and fewer transportation options.

​"The land value will go up and it becomes hard to add housing that is affordable," Spillette said. "It's hard to keep that mix (of incomes) in high-quality areas."