Dive Brief:

• Miami-based workforce housing developer Resia laid off 25% of its workforce, roughly 100 employees, in December 2022 as it adjusted its overhead to “new macroeconomic conditions,” according to its Brazil-based parent company home builder MRV & Co’s 2022 annual report.
• With the job cuts, Resia’s Q1 2023 general and administrative costs should be 25% lower than in Q4 2022, according to the annual report. “They occurred mostly in our development, design and construction teams as we adapted our workforce to reflect the revised number of units we will be delivering this year,” Ernesto Lopes, the president and CEO of Resia, told Multifamily Dive.
• Last year, Lopes told Multifamily Dive that he wanted to deliver 8,000 new apartments in the Sun Belt annually by 2025. “We have postponed — not canceled — some projects and our overall growth plan has not changed,” Lopes told Multifamily Dive this week. “We are still delivering over 4,000 new residential units during 2023 and 2024 throughout Florida, Texas and Georgia, the three states in which Resia operates.”

Dive Insight:

Resia aims to provide moderately priced new housing without government subsidy and sell those assets. But the climate is not conducive to building or selling new properties right now.

“Today's economic environment, inflation that affects our construction cost and rising interest rates — something which has impacted the overall multifamily industry — prompted us to adjust our pace of construction for 2023,” Lopes said.

Resia posted gains in 2022. Its average rent rose 35.2% — from $1,484 to $2,006 — from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022. It sold 1,207 units last year. As of the fourth quarter, it had seven developments under construction and two being stabilized. With those projects, it had 3,241 apartments slated to be sold by 2024, according to MRV & Co.

With the slowdown in the transaction market, Lopes said Resia may need to hold properties longer than anticipated.

“This [asset sales] component of our strategy was also adjusted to meet the current economic environment,” Lopes said. “While we have sold properties right after stabilization, we still have a few properties that we are managing and this is something we will revisit as we move past this current economic climate.”

Earlier this month, the developer opened the 216-unit Resia at Biscayne Drive in Miami. In the press release announcing the project, Resia said that it “continues to scale its development activities in major markets throughout the Southeast.” Additionally, it remains committed to the mission of resolving the housing crisis by building in growing metros where residents are getting priced out by rising rents.

“We are solving one of the major issues that the country faces, which is housing affordability,” Lopes told Multifamily Dive last summer. “There is a huge need for what we’re doing. So we’re very bullish on the demand for our product.”

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