Los Angeles-based real estate investment manager Resmark has formed a joint venture with Vancouver headquartered Intracorp to buy a US residential project site from Rastegar Property.
Intracorp plans to build a mixed-use community on the site at Bouldin Creek in Austin.
Ziv Cohen, Resmark’s CIO, said: “Austin continues to be an attractive investment market for Resmark because of its fast-growing population and job growth, fuelled in large part by an influx of technology jobs driving immigration.”
Resmark invests capital on behalf of institutional investors, including the California State Teachers Retirement System and another large public pension funds in the US.
Cohen said the firm had partnered with Intracorp in projects across several geographies, and that he “looked forward to many more projects” with them.
Ari Rastegar, founder and CEO of Rastegar, told IPE Real Assets: “Pre-COVID, Austin was already one of the hottest housing markets in the US, and the pandemic has accelerated that trend.
“When the pandemic hit, young professionals started fleeing densely-packed coastal cities like New York and San Francisco for Austin’s fair-weather, affordable lifestyle and highly-competitive job market.
Rastegar said that, in the past year alone, Tesla had announced the building of a $1bn (€835.4m) Gigafactory in Austin, while Oracle had decided to move its headquarters to the city, joining Amazon, Facebook, Google and other top-tier tech companies investing in the city long-term.
The arrival of the tech giants had created an “immediate need” for best-in-class housing, both in Austin and its surrounding suburbs, said Rastegar, adding that his firm would retain an investment in the project.
Brad Stein, president, Intracorp Texas, told IPE Real Assets that the Austin site was the company’s second project in Texas.
“Austin has been extremely good to us, and we look forward to continuing to deliver extraordinary homes to this city for years to come,” said Don Forsgren, CEO of Intracorp.
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