Kaufman Development

Kaufman Development Daniel Kaufman. Principal & CEO of Kaufman & Company. 25+ years developing multifamily, mixed-use & workforce housing. Investor. Operator.

Publisher of The Kaufman Report.

The Sun Belt narrative is breaking. The data has been telling you this for a year.Austin is down. Fort Myers is bleeding...
05/16/2026

The Sun Belt narrative is breaking. The data has been telling you this for a year.

Austin is down. Fort Myers is bleeding concessions. San Francisco is back. The apartment market isn’t cooling — it’s splitting into two completely different stories, and where you’re invested right now determines which one you’re living.

Here’s what the May 2026 data actually shows:

→ Texas rents fell 2.1% year over year. Florida dropped 1.6%. Gulf Coast markets are absorbing the combined pressure of rising vacancy and elevated new supply simultaneously.
→ Fort Myers is leading the nation in concessions at 5.3%. When you’re giving back a month of rent just to fill a unit, your pro forma is fiction.
→ San Francisco posted 8.2% annual rent growth. The AI hiring boom — OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia — is doing what three years of remote work narrative said couldn’t happen.
→ New York City average one-bedroom: $4,104/month. That’s 69% of median household income. That’s not a market inefficiency. That’s a structural condition.
→ Chicago apartment searches up 16% quarter-over-quarter. We’ve been bullish on Chicago while institutional capital was talking about the city like it was uninvestable. The search trend is the market catching up to what the fundamentals have been saying for two years.

I’ve said it before and the data keeps confirming it: by the time a market is on the cover of a magazine, we’re already positioning the exit. We were in Bentonville and Raleigh before the institutions arrived. Today we’re focused on Northwest Indiana, Burlington VT, and markets tied to AI-driven job growth.

The Sun Belt isn’t uninvestable. But the blind-faith development model that worked from 2019 to 2022 is over. Markets with durable demand drivers and supply constraints are where disciplined capital goes next.

The full May 2026 issue of the Daniel Kaufman Real Estate News Report — including a second story on why independent coworking operators in Midwest secondary markets are quietly winning where the national brands can’t compete — is live now.

Read it here: https://danielkaufmanreal.estate/2026/05/15/the-sun-belt-narrative-is-breaking-the-data-has-been-telling-you-this-for-a-year/

🏆 Exciting news to share.I've been named a KeyCrew Verified Expert in Contrarian Real Estate by KeyCrew Media — joining ...
05/15/2026

🏆 Exciting news to share.

I've been named a KeyCrew Verified Expert in Contrarian Real Estate by KeyCrew Media — joining a select group of market authorities contributing forward-looking analysis on the trends reshaping our industry.

At Kaufman & Company, we've built a vertically integrated platform that operates without outside capital across the entire development lifecycle — land acquisition, entitlements, architecture, construction, asset management, and property management. To date, we've overseen the development of more than 10,000 multifamily units across the United States.

Our edge? We don't follow the headlines — we follow the data.

By the time a market is on the cover of a magazine, we're already positioning the exit. We entered Bentonville, AR and Raleigh, NC years before Blackstone and other institutional players took notice. Today, we're focused on Northwest Indiana, Burlington, VT, and select markets tied to AI-driven job growth in New York and San Francisco.

Through KeyCrew, I'll be sharing insights on:
→ Macro signal reading & disciplined market exits → Modular construction & solving the housing affordability crisis
→ Vertical integration in real estate
→ The no-outside-capital development model
→ Contrarian market identification before institutional capital arrives

Grateful to the team at KeyCrew Media for the recognition — and excited to contribute to the conversation about where the smart money is moving next.

Read the full announcement: https://www.openpr.com/news/4510416/keycrew-media-names-daniel-kaufman-a-verified-expert

"Conviction in our industry, more often than not, is just emotion wearing a suit."That's how KeyCrew Journal opened a pi...
05/13/2026

"Conviction in our industry, more often than not, is just emotion wearing a suit."

That's how KeyCrew Journal opened a piece this week about how we approach the market at Kaufman & Company — and it captures something I've believed for a long time. The developers who consistently outperform aren't the loudest voices in the room. They're the ones watching data points most operators don't even know to track.

A few of the calls that came out of the conversation:

We exited Florida well before the correction made headlines. Net out-migration, concession spikes, and rising insurance costs were all signaling the shift long before the prevailing narrative caught up.

Conversely, we were active in Bentonville, Arkansas before institutional capital arrived. Same playbook in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Burlington, Vermont — a market of roughly 75,000 residents that most developers dismiss because it sits below the institutional threshold, despite having near-zero vacancy and some of the strongest rent-to-cost ratios in the country.

The indicators that actually predict demand — concession trends, job sector composition, sub-market level data — are less glamorous than market sentiment, but far more reliable. By the time a market is being called "hot" in the national press, it's almost always past peak for operators trying to build and generate returns.

Full piece here: https://keycrew.co/journal/most-real-estate-developers-are-reading-the-market-wrong-heres-what-the-data-actually-shows/

Thanks to Heather Hook and the team at KeyCrew Journal for the careful editorial work on this one.

What's the leading indicator you watch that most of your peers don't?

Los Angeles multifamily permitting just jumped 85% year over year to 15,735 units. The city of LA is now the #1 permitt...
05/12/2026

Los Angeles multifamily permitting just jumped 85% year over year to 15,735 units.

The city of LA is now the #1 permitting market in the United States.

Everyone will write about the number. Very few will explain what it actually means.
Here is my read as someone who has been developing in this market for over two decades:
Los Angeles never stopped being one of the best long-term real estate markets in the world. The narrative just needed time to catch up with the reality.

For most of the post-pandemic cycle, the consensus was clear: Sun Belt good, coastal bad. Austin was the darling. Phoenix was the growth story. Dallas was absorbing migration like a sponge.

We stayed patient. We stayed in our market. And we kept our eyes on the fundamentals that don’t move with headlines — supply constraint, renter demand density, and the simple demographic reality that millions of people want to live here and there is nowhere near enough housing for them.

The data is now catching up. Austin is pulling back sharply. Orlando and Atlanta are declining year over year. Florida remains overpriced relative to fundamentals. Meanwhile Los Angeles is outpacing every major US metro for annual permit growth — by a wide margin.

We are bullish on Los Angeles. Not cautiously optimistic. Not hedged with caveats. Bullish.
I break down the full picture in the latest issue of The Kaufman Report — including what the permitting surge actually means for deliveries, where we stand on Chicago, Vermont, Texas, and Florida, and why coastal gateway cities are reclaiming developer attention after years of Sun Belt dominance.

Read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/danielkaufmanre/p/los-angeles-is-back-and-we-never?r=6grdsr&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish

Daniel Kaufman
Principal & CEO, Kaufman & Company
Originate. Operate. Hold.

Most multifamily investors chasing growth headlines are still sleeping on the Upper Midwest.Q1 2026 data says that's a m...
05/08/2026

Most multifamily investors chasing growth headlines are still sleeping on the Upper Midwest.

Q1 2026 data says that's a mistake.

Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee — these markets quietly posted some of the healthiest apartment fundamentals in the country to open the year. Tighter occupancy. Steady rent growth. Fewer concessions. And none of the supply hangover still punishing Sun Belt operators who overbuilt into a rate spike.

The through-line: supply discipline. These markets never absorbed the record delivery volumes that flooded Sun Belt metros over the past two years. That restraint is paying dividends now — and the setup looks favorable through 2027 as starts continue slowing nationally.

Chicago's rebound is particularly notable. Urban Class A product that was bleeding vacancy in '21 and '22 has found its footing. If fundamentals keep improving through the back half of 2026, the institutional perception gap starts to close — and the repricing opportunity becomes real.

This isn't a growth play. It's a cash flow and stability play. In a higher-rate, higher-expense environment, that distinction matters more than it did in 2021.

Full breakdown on the Kaufman Development Report 👇
https://www.tumblr.com/dkaufmandevelopment/816056175285125120/the-upper-midwest-apartment-story-nobodys

We exited Florida. Deliberately.The capital stack dynamics, the insurance environment, the cost basis — none of it penci...
05/04/2026

We exited Florida. Deliberately.

The capital stack dynamics, the insurance environment, the cost basis — none of it penciled the way we needed it to. We're disciplined about where we deploy time and capital, and Florida no longer fit.

But we never stopped watching.

Right now, South Florida cities are handing land to developers for free — and it's sparking one of the more important debates in affordable housing today.

Miami transferred parcels worth over $8M to a private group for affordable housing in Little Havana. West Palm Beach followed with five city-owned parcels for a 151-unit project, upzoning the sites to seven-story density in the same move.

This is the model that makes affordable housing viable in high-cost markets. Not tax credits alone. Not creative financing alone. Land cost removal is the single most powerful lever in a development pro forma.

Institutional capital has already figured this out. The supply-demand math is undeniable.

But the transparency questions are real too — and I don't paper over them.

We're not deploying in Florida. We are watching how this model evolves, because the mechanics are directly applicable to markets where we are active.

The inside scoop is in the full post. Worth a read if you're in the affordable or workforce housing space — as a developer, lender, or equity investor.

👇 Full post on The Kaufman & Company Report:
https://medium.com//we-left-florida-but-this-is-worth-watching-48f95e367434

The Florida narrative and the Florida data are two very different things.Everyone is still selling the dream — no income...
04/30/2026

The Florida narrative and the Florida data are two very different things.

Everyone is still selling the dream — no income tax, sunshine, migration boom. The brokers are still posting. The developers are still pitching.

Here's what the numbers actually say:

→ Net domestic migration to Florida collapsed 93% in three years. From 310,892 in 2022 to 22,517 in 2025. The pandemic migration trade is over.

→ Nearly 50% of current Florida residents have considered leaving because of the cost of living. That's not a fringe statistic. That's an FAU poll of the people already there.

→ Florida homeowners pay 4.5x the national average for property insurance — roughly $8,000 a year. That alone wipes out $100,000 in purchasing power before you look at the price of the house.

→ Miami-Dade condo inventory hit 13.2 months' supply. 40% of condo owners faced special assessments in the last three years. Some buildings assessed $134K to $400K per unit. Many of those buildings can no longer get conventional financing.

→ 33.6% of active Florida listings have price reductions. In Southwest Florida, that number exceeds 40%.

And the demographic story is the one nobody is talking about: the people leaving aren't retirees. They're workers aged 20-29. Florida is trading its labor force for fixed-income arrivals — and the long-term demand picture for real estate follows that workforce.

This isn't a crash call. It's a structural repricing of carrying costs that has years, not quarters, left to run.

I've been cautious on Florida for two years. The data keeps telling me why.

Full breakdown in the latest issue of The Kaufman Report 👇
https://open.substack.com/pub/danielkaufmanre/p/the-florida-mirage-what-the-data?r=6grdsr&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish

Private capital isn’t broken because of a deal shortage.It’s broken because of a structure shortage.We built AIBrokers.p...
04/29/2026

Private capital isn’t broken because of a deal shortage.

It’s broken because of a structure shortage.
We built AIBrokers.pro to fix it — closed network, AI-powered underwriting, decision-ready deal flow delivered to qualified capital partners in real time.

100 slots globally. 27 remain.

https://aibrokerspro.netlify.app/

Address

​9830 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA
90212

Opening Hours

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Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Website

https://linktr.ee/DanielKaufman

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