Forty-five days ago, a multifamily asset on the market would receive bids from 30 groups, unintentionally driving up the price for the property. Today, the buyers are still there but there are fewer of them and many of the deals aren't hitting their whisper price, according to Noam Franklin, Managing Director – Head of Eastern US, JV Equity & Structured Capital Group, at Berkadia. "Almost every deal I'll ask if the whisper price has been hit and the answer is no," he tells GlobeSt.com. "There still is a healthy return but there is some discount," usually around 6 to 10%. 

Multifamily, as healthy and robust as the asset class is, apparently is not immune to the forces of gravity after all. The same economic uncertainty the greater markets have been experiencing, led by spiraling inflation and rising interest rates, is nibbling around the edges of the apartment asset class with some clear effects. For many in the market, these cracks in the market may be worrisome but for Franklin they spell opportunity. Franklin represents institutional equity in the housing market and for the last year many of the multifamily deals he has sent over have been too rich for institutional capital seeking out value-add JV investments. Once they would unwind the rents and pencil in the money on upgrades, they would find that the return was not equal to the risk they would have to take. So these life companies, private equity providers and pension funds, for the most part, stayed on the sidelines instead of investing through JVs.

Instead, what they did was take a barbell approach, Franklin explains, blending some ground up deals, some core plus and so on to reach a value add return.

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Erika Morphy

Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.