Last year, the Austin City Council decided, wisely, not to rush into a sketchily conceived challenge of the Travis County commercial tax roll. Now, the new 10-1 council appears ready to make that mistake, appealing to the emotions and biases of its political base and ignoring the realities of the cost of living and governing in Austin.

Austin is a business-friendly city, but it's not the business-friendliest one in Texas, according to the latest annual ranking by MarketWatch.com.

As Austin-area businesses begin to assess the damage wrought by flooding that followed a weekend of drenching rain, there's a good chance that some of them are up a creek without a paddle, as far as insurance goes.

An Austin-based commercial real estate investment and lending firm is launching a new $50 million fund and ramping up its private lending business in Texas.

Thrive, FP created Thrive Lending Fund, LLC to oversee its private lending and debt business, and brought banking industry executive Justin Brogna on board to be COO of Thrive Lending. Brogna previously served as the Austin president of Independent Bank.

Texas lawmakers used the first, and probably the last, weekend of work in the 84th session to address several issues of interest to the business community. Here are the highlights:

A huge mixed-use development is planned on U.S. Highway 290 in far Southwest Austin adjacent to the Belterra master-planned community.

More players are joining the student housing industry as the demand for beds increases across the country. It’s one of the reasons we’re excited to bring you Bisnow’s Annual Student Housing Summit (BASH) on June 2 in Philly. We asked Axiometrics student housing research analyst Taylor Gunn to help us assemble the top 10 student housing owners based on most owned off-campus beds.

Taking a second and third look at its final bid for a senior housing project, Round Rock-based Oakbrook Builders looked for ways to cut costs. What it discovered was 25 ways the project could save money without sacrificing quality. The result: $1.2M less than the original bid. Oakbrook president Darrell Smith gave us three ways to cut building costs.

Until recently, few people had associated downtown Austin real estate development with Chereen Fisher. She’s made a believer out of Stream Realty Partners.

A project worth nearly $1 billion that’s in the works for North Fort Worth hopes to lure social media giant Facebook to Texas.

Energy efficiency should be a no-brainer in commercial real estate, but competing interests between landlord and tenant often discourage commercial efficiency upgrades – a major roadblock to cutting power sector emissions and utility bills, considering 40% of all US office space is leased.

The housing market for older adults appears to be going strong, according to the National Association of Home Builder’s (NAHB) most recent 55+ Housing Market Index (HMI).

The major areas of interest in the commercial real estate industry are on the ownership side with transactions (sale, finance or lease), investment returns and investment strategy as the most important. The focus on the ownership and management side of CRE is important because these areas are considered the sexiest and of most interest to developers, fund sponsors and investors. Two of the prime measures of success in the CRE industry are: how much property an investor owns or the amount of assets under management; and what is the track record of the investor with its investment program.

Prior posts have discussed initial considerations in the purchase of commercial real estate and conducting due diligence prior to closing the deal. Today’s focus will now turn to contingencies often found in commercial real estate contracts.

When: Wednesday, June 10
11:15 AM - 1:00 PM

Where: The Four Seasons Hotel
98 San Jacinto Blvd.

The June Ideas Forum will feature a media panel analyzing the results of the 2015 Texas legislative session, with a particular focus on transportation and land development.

Thursday, June 11
From 2 PM to 3 PM

Online Webinar

If you regularly work on Traffic Impact Analysis (TIA) then you need to watch this webinar. You’ll learn everything you need to know about TIA requirements for new development projects as well as how and when to effectively incorporate a traffic engineer into your project team. You’ll also learn about the differences between a TIA, Traffic Study and Parking Study.