The Grand Rapids, Michigan real estate market has had a better turnaround than most second-tier Rust Belt communities.
Chicago-based Triad Real Estate Partners released a Grand Rapids Research Report this month showing Grand Rapids has a 98 percent occupancy rate among the 17,000 units in 50 apartment complexes surveyed.
Dane Olmstead, Triad’s director of research and analytics, grew up in Kalamazoo and said that, during his high school years in the late 1990s, Grand Rapids didn’t seem to have much going on.
He said the strategies the city has employed are similar to those across the Midwest but it seems to have cued in to those strategies better than most.
“Among secondary markets, Grand Rapids has pulled off one of the great turnarounds,” Olmstead said. “In the past four or five years, the hard work from a decade or more ago is coming to fruition, from the riverfront development to re-concentrating on the downtown core.”
Image credit: http://downtowngr.org