It’s happening. More and more condo developers are switching horses in midstream, transforming projects that were originally going to be condos into rentals, says The Sun. The big Brooklyn examples are the Kodachrome in Bed-Stuy and Dumbo’s 99 Gold (though both are ancient news). David Maundrell, the president of marketing firm aptsandlofts.com, says 95 percent of his company’s projects a few years ago were condominiums, but around 60 percent are now rentals. “There’s been an enormous shift in the past 12 months,” the senior managing director of Beck Street Capital, Kevin Comer, said. “Lenders only want to lend on cash flow projects. They want to be certain that they have a fallback as a rental that works.’ And those are the projects that are actually getting built; according to Comer, “We have seen an increase in the number of investment opportunities that we see that are fully permitted development sites where the developers are just trying to get out of them.”
Credit Crunch Turns Condos Into Rentals [NY Sun]
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