Ric Campo
Analyst · your question.
Sure. Historically, over the last 20 years, people would sort of take total jobs and it was -- the rule of thumb was five jobs creates one multifamily housing demand. And so, there are lot of ratios, lot of groups still look at that ratio. And I think though that you’re on to something that that ratio is sort of broken now, and it’s broken because -- and I’ll give you a great example of it. In 2016, Houston basically went from 120,000 jobs in 2014, some jobs in 2015 but in 2016, there were basically zero jobs, some people say 10,000, so very limited jobs. In 2016, we have served 15,500 apartment units in Houston. People are like well, how’s that possible? Yet no jobs. Well, what’s happening is two things. One is, there is this pent up demand because people -- we’ve had this housing shortage going on for quite a while, so it’s a pent up demand. You still have over 1 million millennials that are living at home or roommate situations because they haven’t been able to save enough money to either get out of home or to break the roommate scenario. So, there is still a pent up demand from multifamily. And because of this demographic sort of shift, this millennial that’s more experiential, and they don’t want to buy things, they don’t want to be tied down buying house. So, you delay marriages, you delay child’s birth and people having kids. And so all that has really fundamentally changed the demand picture for multifamily vis-à-vis how many jobs you need. And then the other part of that equation is, and I’ll use Houston as an example for this as well. So, the new product that’s being built today is more hotel-like, it’s more amenities, there is conference centers, there is art studios and golf simulation rooms and it’s just bars and all kinds of different things. And so that product did not exist five years ago at all. And so, it’s happened and these empty nester groups are now saying, I can move into the urban corridor, I can lease an apartment at what I was paying for my big house in the suburbs, I don’t have to drive and I’m closer to amenities and closer to kind of the things I want to do. And so that’s driving demand as well. So, I think that the confluence of millennials, the pent up demand and then the empty nesters moving from suburbs to a more urban -- and urban doesn’t mean downtown, urban like Houston means, Sugar Land downtown or Galleria or Woodlands or downtown. So, if there is multiple urban cores. It’s not just a specific downtown. So I do think that it’s having -- those three factors are having change in this whole idea that you need five jobs to create one multi-family demand.