Real Estate Bubble Worsens With Auction Style Pricing

Real Estate Bubble Worsens With Auction Style Pricing

Consider this the most extreme test yet of just how badly people want to live in urban Nashville.
The developer of a 19-story apartment tower at Midtown’s Music Row roundabout is auctioning its 14 penthouse units. What that means: Potential renters will bid on the units, and whoever is willing to pay the most rent wins a one-year lease at that price.

The auction illustrates just how much developers believe they can capitalize on all the factors that seem to give them the upper hand right now — chiefly, a surging population driven by millennials who want to rent in the urban core, plus job growth ranking among the ten best in the nation in each of the last three years.

The starting prices ( see the auction here) underscore the light-speed leaps that rents in the city have taken because of that demand. Bidding on the one-bedroom penthouse units begins at $5,300 per month (nope, not a typo). Minimum starting bids for the two-bedroom units range from $5,600 a month to $9,000 a month (still not a typo, I double-checked). The minimum bid for a three-bedroom unit is between $8,000 a month to $10,000 a month (people, I have professional editors. These figures are real. See for yourself!)

The penthouse units range from 1,166 square feet to 3,374 square feet. Even amid Nashville’s frenzied construction boom and white-hot real estate market, the views from these penthouses should be unobstructed for quite some time — considering the building’s height and the fact that it sits atop a small hill overlooking downtown.
The developer of the $100 million tower, Charlotte-based Childress Klein, says such bidding occurs in other cities. This is the first instance I’m aware of in Nashville, another sign of how the city is quickly evolving.
Like eBay, Childress Klein is allowing people the option to bypass the bidding process — in their terms, the “secure your penthouse now” option. For the priciest one-bedroom apartment, that means committing to pay $8,100 monthly rent, which is $6.95 for every square foot. For the priciest three-bedroom apartment, that means committing to pay $15,000 monthly rent — or, $4.45 per square foot. (continue reading at Nashville Business Journal)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *