OC Apartment Development Roars in Business District

Apartment construction is booming in the Airport Area submarket in Orange County. According to a new report from JLL, the business district office submarket has 2,203 housing units currently under construction and 4,845 approved for construction. This is a significant addition to the nearly 12,000 units that already exist in the submarket.

“Orange County’s workforce is growing, the most recent June update from the California EDD shows the county’s nonfarm employment at 1,673,100, the largest on record,” Jared Dienstag, research manager at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. “Many of these employees are millennials and prefer to live in multi-family housing. In the last 10 years, Orange County’s workforce has increased by 282,500, or 20 percent. As Orange County’s primary business district, it is not a surprise that multi-family development has been rampant in the area with people looking to trim daily commutes, so they have a short drive, or even bike or walk to work.”

The development activity in the submarket accounts for nearly a quarter of the total multifamily new construction in all of Orange County. “Majority of the projects in the Airport Area that have recently been completed or are currently under development have replaced obsolete commercial buildings, this is a trend that is occurring throughout Orange County,” says Dienstag.