TCC Sets Up for Big Multifamily Growth This Year

Trammell Crow Co. has big growth plans in Phoenix. With its multifamily affiliate High Street Residential, the firm entered the market earlier this year with its first project, and plans to do $60 million worth of multifamily development activity in its first year. To support the growing business, Trammell Crow has hired Mona Nanda as a senior associate and Courtney Dunlap as development manager.

“We are very quickly growing our multifamily business under the brand High Street Residential,” Jim Mahoney, senior managing director with TCC’s Phoenix Business Unit, tells GlobeSt.com. “We have gone from not being in the multifamily business, and in our first year, we will do $60 million of development. We are forecasting, with projects that we have in our pipeline, that by 2022, we will have $300 million in development activity in this product line alone. When you have a growing business like that, you have to have the personnel resources that allow that business to have the best opportunity to flourish.”

This growth is not exclusive to the Phoenix market. Trammell Crow has been growing its multifamily business nationally. “Multifamily now represents 25% to 30% of our overall business nationally,” says Mahoney. “We are at about $1.2 billion of in process or pipeline development activity nationally

.”

Still, the multifamily market is a wealth of opportunities for multifamily development. Mahoney says that 70,000 to 80,000 people are moving to the market each year, and 60,000 new jobs annually have been added to the market. In addition to this substantial population and job growth, there are also less than half the new housing starts as the prior peak. “We have people moving here; we have good job creation; and people are no longer buying single-family houses,” he says. “So, where are they living? Some of them are renting single-family housing, but a good number of them are moving into multifamily because it is flexible and has amenities. We think that this is a good business, and we are committed to it here and around the country.” In addition, younger people do not view homeownership as the primary wealth creation vehicle. All of this bodes well for continued multifamily demand and absorption.

As a result, TCC will likely continue to grow its business unit to support growth. “We are always looking to add people to our organization that we think can make us better,” says Mahoney. “In that regard, we are always looking to add people and evaluating personnel. In this particular case, we were looking to support an emerging business.”