College kids are notorious for a lot of things: being broke, having liberal points of view, and consuming a lot of keg beer, to name a few.
But in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood, those same beer-guzzling youngsters might also be responsible for the revival of and demand for real estate in the Motor City.
The combination of museums and galleries, bars and restaurants, and locally owned boutiques in Detroit’s “hippest new neighborhood” alongside the campus of Wayne State University just might be the recipe that the city needs to accelerate its recovery.
According to this article by Crain’s Detroit, leading up to 2009 the average age of tenants decreased from 41 to 33 in conjunction with salary from $70,000 to $52,000. But “in the last six months, the age hasn’t changed but the income has,” back up toward $70k, the piece reports.
Various reports from Curbed Detroit, Detroit CBS Local, and even the New York Times put the occupancy rate for apartments in Detroit somewhere in the mid to upper ninety percentile.
But that puts us in a sort of chicken-or-egg conundrum: is the desire to live in Detroit that high, or is the adequacy of the real estate that low? Either way, the apartments that Detroit has to offer are in high demand; good news for the city (and its potential investors) no matter which way you slice it.
Along with WSU, the Detroit Medical Center and the Henry Ford Health System contribute considerable foot traffic on the streets of the neighborhood, in conjunction with the demand for rentals in both Midtown and Downtown.
Downtown’s demand has been increasing since the impetus of Quicken Loans, resulting in thousands of new jobs in the area, thanks to CEO (and heir to Detroit) Dan Gilbert.
The fantastic trend at the moment is to revamp historic buildings – which both preserves the city and gives investors an incentive – into mixed-use spaces for both residential and retail opportunities.
When Detroit real estate boils down, it doesn’t matter why apartments are filling and rent is creeping up; all that matters is that people want to live in the Motor City again.
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