Tornados Continue to Tear Apart the Midwest

Violent tornados ripped up parts of the central United States last night, killing at least 15 people in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas. The storms ravaged homes, crushed cars, toppled trees and tore up a fire station in rural Arkansas. Winds exceeded 150 mph.

The destruction comes on the heels of a tornado that killed 122 people just days earlier in the southwest Missouri city of Joplin. The National Weather Service reports that more than 500 people have been killed this tornado season, making it the worst since 1953. The season is expected to end around mid July.

David Bohanon, senior associate in Marcus and Millichap’s Oklahoma City office, tells MHN that, fortunately, Oklahoma City avoided damage in heavily populated areas. Based on that, it is likely that the multifamily sector in the area has seen no significant disruption.

Ryan Severino, senior economist at Reis, Inc., tells MHN, “It is really difficult to say exactly what the impact will be without knowing the specific extent of the damage. To the best of my knowledge, the major metropolitan areas in that part of the country were not directly hit, so any impact should be at a very micro level in much smaller communities that are probably not tracked by many (if any) market researchers.” Theoretically, he says, “Destroyed supply, if significant enough, could potentially spur development activity, but that is holding everything else constant. There are so many other variables to this that in the immediate aftermath with little hard data it is virtually impossible to say with any certainty what the effects are likely to be.”

With such extensive damage to the affected areas, details will come in gradually. Lane Company’s Ashley Moore recently shared with MHN her account of a tornado that destroyed a seniors community in Tuscaloosa, Ala. A month after the devastation suffered by that particular storm, repair efforts in the area still have a long way to go, with aid and supplies being collected and distributed to the victims.