The Latest Real Estate Amenity: Gigabit Internet Service

urbanland.com | When Mark Toro, a managing partner of North American Properties, was planning the mixed-use development that became Avalon in suburban Atlanta, he looked for ways to differentiate the residences, restaurants, retailers, and offices from the rest of suburbia. One way he chose was to create a walkable, dense urban-flavored commercial center. Another way was to make Avalon one of Atlanta’s first “fiberhoods” providing total one-gigabit service within the neighborhood. It cost in the “six figures” to do this, Toro says, but that is a fraction of the overall $600 million development cost.

As a result, Avalon’s first phase, which opened in fall 2014, has attracted companies that covet the gig. One is an architecture firm that often transfers its designs overseas: files that used to take hours at night to upload now take just minutes. Avalon, which was named 2015 Project of the Year by ULI Atlanta, now commands rents on multifamily housing that are one-third higher than those in the surrounding market and has retention rates that are higher than North American’s other U.S. communities, Toro says. He is now including one-gig fiber capabilities at all the company’s other Atlanta-area projects.

“I don’t think we’ll ever build anything else without it,” says Toro, the former Livable Communities Council chair for ULI Atlanta. “We are future-proofing our offering and differentiating ourselves in a new way.” Read More...