Dean & DeWitt
November 18, 2016
Reported by: Mark Gordon, Business Observer
Company: Dean predicts moderate growth for St. Petersburg–based Dean & Dewitt Property Management in 2017. “We’ve been in pretty fast growth mode over the past two years,” he says. “I still expect to grow, but the speed of growth is not going to be as fast.”
Industry: Dean doesn’t anticipate another real estate bubble, because there’s been more responsible lending and more cash purchases than in 2006.
“But you can’t just continue to have rapid growth,” he says. “We started out with a very depressed market, so tons of investors entered the market. A lot have pulled out because they can’t get the returns they were getting. More owner-occupied types of buyers will soften the market. Prices will be negotiated more, and maybe in two to three years we’ll be seeing property values only increase commensurate with inflation.”