Earlier this month, Andrea V. Brambila reported on the Top 10 Real Estate Boomtowns for Inman News, a leading source for independent real estate news for industry professionals and consumers. The basis for the projections about hot real estate markets as based on population estimates from ProximityOne, a firm specializing in demographics used for decision-making and goal-setting.

When all the numbers were crunched, they forecast population growth of 8.9 percent for the U.S. from 2010 to 2020. That means the country will likely have a population of 337.1 million by the end of the decade. This takes into account information from the 2010 census as well as patterns in the historical data on national birth, death, and migration trends.

The census tracked a 9.7 percent increase in population from 2000 to 2010, putting us at roughly 308.7 million inhabitants currently. What does this mean for real estate? Well, just look at the numbers. Give or take a few souls this way or that, 30 million more people are going to need somewhere to live over the next ten years. Just given the way our modern society runs, metro areas will absorb a large portion of that growth, in particular, in the states that saw the largest increases over the last decade: North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Georgia, Idaho, and Colorado.

The Austin-Round Rock metro area, which had a 2010 population of approximately 1.7 million will have a projected 33.1 percent increase by 2010 to roughly 2.3 million. That puts us in third place on the list of real estate boom towns. (The Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina metro area was first, with the Kennewick-Pasco-Richaland, Washington region at second.)

We don't really need to run down the list of what makes Austin attractive -- diverse economy, strong government, excellent education base, strong job market especially in tech (Google and Facebook have offices in our city), live music, festivals. The things to concentrate on are those numbers, because they are all headed in the direction we like. Up.

This is the time for real estate investors to target and to acquire prime properties. Over the next few years rental rates will keep track with rising demand, and profitable sales of units are a given. With the city's plans for the further focused development of the neighborhoods in and around downtown, as well as the anticipated explosion of growth around the F1 track, all investors need to do is jump on the train and ride.

Posted by Monte Davis on
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