WASHINGTON, DC-Over the past few years Ritz Banc Group, a locally-based private equity and alternative asset manager, has slowly but steadily been acquiring value-add multifamily and office properties in the Washington DC area and more recently in Richmond, VA, on behalf of its investor base -- high-net worth individuals and family offices in the Middle East. Most recently it acquired two properties in back-to-back deals totaling about $80 million, one of which was Seven Oaks Apartments in Odenton, MD, for $60 million. It acquired it in a JV structure on behalf of a Saudi family office.

Fairfield Residential was the seller.

With this string of deals under its belt, the firm is preparing to looking even further south for acquisitions, managing director Nasr El Hage Jr. tells GlobeSt.com.

"Our investors continue to increase and they like the opportunities that these properties offer," he says. Ritz Banc will be looking at properties in South and North Carolina and Texas.

"The economics for apartments are very favorable and the south offers a low cost of doing business," he says.

Ritz Banc expects it will make one transaction per quarter in 2016, for a total of about $100 million in equity or $200 million in transaction volume.

For most of these deals the company has partnered with another company. It has, for example, purchased a few properties with StoneBridge Investments, including the 278-unit Seven Oaks.

The companies liked Seven Oaks for several reasons, but especially because it is adjacent to Fort Meade and the headquarters of US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency and Odenton Town Center. The Seven Oaks purchase was a 1031 trade for the Saudi family that originally invested in one of Ritz Banc's first deals -- Spalding Crossing, a 252-unit apartment in Atlanta, which traded for $40 million two-and-a-half years ago.

Last month Ritz Banc Group acquired Sterling Forest Apartments, a 178-unit multifamily property in Raleigh, NC. For this deal, Ritz Banc partnered with Lincoln Property Co.

None of this means that Ritz Banc has said goodbye to its hometown of DC – or for that matter, it is only interested in multifamily and office products. True, the company decided to look further afield for investment when DC became too pricey. However, at the moment Hage is conducting preliminary due diligence on a local asset that he said looks promising. It's a a retail shopping center. If Ritz Banc does buy it, it would be an off market trade, Hage says.