TALLAHASSEE · The Florida Legislature on Tuesday voted to change the state’s 34-year-old rental laws to allow landlords to impose thousands of dollars in new penalties on tenants who break their leases.

Legislators authorized landlords to draw up rental contracts with early termination fees of two months’ rent, plus additional penalties equal to another month to compensate owners for any concessions or discounts they made.

But in order to become law, the bill (HB 1277) must pass Gov. Charlie Crist, who rents a condo in St. Petersburg. After Tuesday’s vote, Crist said he’d be “sympathetic” to renters. Until last fall, he also rented an apartment in Tallahassee, but broke the lease to move into the governor’s mansion in January.

“And it was costly. It was like $900. I feel the people’s pain,” Crist said.

Crist’s spokeswoman, Erin Isaac, later said the governor was speaking generally and had not yet taken a position on the bill.

The early termination fee would apply not only to tenants who leave midway through a rental contract, but those who don’t give 60-day written notice they are not renewing their leases. Read more

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Equity Residential, the largest U.S. apartment owner, and Apartment Investment & Management Co., the nation’s fourth largest, sold 53,000 apartments last year so that they could move their investments to faster growing parts of the country.

The companies sold in markets such as Dallas, Detroit, Houston, and Indianapolis and purchased or upgraded apartments in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C.,South Florida, Southern California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
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New Orleans needs an affordable housing plan, says Donald Powell, who is leading President Bush’s Gulf Coast recovery effort. Powell told The Associated Press that he has met with 100 of the largest financial groups in the country to discuss a housing investment program in the city and the result is encouraging.

Lack of affordable housing is seen as an impediment to New Orleans’ recovery from Katrina, which severely damaged about 56 percent of the city’s occupied housing units. High rents make it difficult for residents to return and for prospective workers, vital to schools, businesses and the rebuilding effort, to come.
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Office rents in Manhattan surged to an all-time high in the first three months of the year as job growth pushed the vacancy rate below 6% for the first time in six years. Overall asking rents rose an average 24% from a year earlier to $53.43 a square foot, real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield said yesterday. The previous record was $50.92 a square foot in the fourth quarter of 2000. Rents for Class A office buildings - those considered by brokers and landlords to be the best office in the most desirable locations - gained 29% to a record $64.54 a square foot. “Ive never seen anything quite this dramatic,” said Joseph Harbert, Cushman’s chief operation officer for the metro region. Read more

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Every cloud has a silver lining, usually shining on somebody else. Now, with the owner-occupied sector of housing in a downturn, it is the apartment industry’s turn.

The National Multi-Housing Council (NMHC) recently declared “It’s official. The dark days of the apartment market recession are officially over.” This euphoric claim is contained in the annual report of the national association which represents 1000 members from the apartment development, marketing and management industries. The report went on to say that the current demand for rental housing is at remarkable levels because rising interest rates and skyrocketing housing costs are keeping many would-be buyers in apartments while supply is relatively constrained by escalating land and construction costs the conversion of thousands of rental units to condominiums. Read more

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A Jersey City, N.J., pediatrician and two real estate practitioners have been charged with discriminating against renters with children by the New Jersey state Division of Civil Rights.

Dr. Badawy M. Badawy is accused of refusing to rent to people with children. Real estate professionals Elizabeth Romero and Fausto Diaz, who helped him rent the space, are also charged, according to officials.

The Division of Civil Rights used two testers to call the real estate agency and ask about vacancies in the apartment building, after finding the ad on Craig’s List. They reported they were told that Badawy’s apartment would not be available to renters with children. Read more

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Renters be warned: Landlords are expected to raise apartment rents for a third-straight year in 2007, forcing tenants to turn over a growing chunk of their pay and making it harder to save for a home, a report to be issued today by Marcus & Millichap finds.

With the projected rise of 5% this year, rents would be 14% higher than at the end of 2004, the report says. Over the same period, paychecks are expected to rise 4%, adjusted for inflation.

The widening gap is likely to worsen the crisis for workforce housing, especially in coastal cities, says Hessam Nadji, a managing director at Marcus & Millichap, a real estate investment brokerage. “This is a national trend. We’re seeing rents rise in the majority of markets, and we see this continuing for at least three years.”

From 2000 to 2004, most landlords couldn’t raise rents because so many tenants were leaving to buy houses or condos. To feed that buying frenzy, about 300,000 apartments were converted to condos for sale in the past three years. Now, even with 92,000 new rental units this year, the stock is still too little to meet rising demand.

Renters will get a bit of a break in places such as Miami, Las Vegas and San Diego, where investors bought thousands of condos, hoping to flip them for a quick profit. Since the market faltered in late 2005, many of those condos have been empty, and investors are seeking tenants to help pay the mortgage. Read more

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The office market experienced a great year in 2006, with demand surpassing expectations for office space nationwide, according to a report by Colliers International.

Downtown asking rents increased 6.4 percent during the fourth quarter, reaching an average of $41.01 a square foot. Suburban rents also increased during the quarter, rising 3.6 percent to $25.84 a square foot. Downtown rents rose 18.2 percent for 2006, with suburban rents up 7.5 percent. Read more

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