UPDATED: The Apartment Market Cycle Peak Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet

Apartment Building Investment Cycle with Expanded Peak
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The… Low Cap Rates. Click on image for full size.

Was quoted in a Multifamily Executive piece this week by Joe Bousquin Cap Rate Limbo: How Low Can They Go? discussing where we are in the apartment building investment cycle, whether multifamily cap rates could go any lower and how do you make a deal pencil in this environment. It’s a good quick read with apartment pros from around the country sharing their thoughts on how things stand. I really got a kick out of the Barbara Gaffen’s story about a Chicago property trading for $651,000 a unit.

Here are the rest of my comments:

The market cycle peak is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Cycle tops (in the absence of a financial meltdown) tend to be rounded and therefore very hard to call. We’re focused Continue reading UPDATED: The Apartment Market Cycle Peak Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet

10 Year Apartment Building Investment Loan Rate Now Below 4.5% on Falling Treasury

After flatlining at 4.5% for over 10 weeks, the 1oyr apartment building investment loan rate we track dropped to 4.375% in the middle of January and has remained there since:

10 year apartment investment loan rate February 2015

All this while the 10 year Treasury (T10) got within 2bp of the 1.66 posted back in May of 2013, causing the spread to widen to the two and a half range from two and a quarter. That in turn is causing the trailing 6 month average to continue its upward curve, now in the 2.25 range.

One other bit of news is that the 15 year am & term loan that we track got to 4.5% about the same time as the 10 year loan only it hasn’t fallen since then. Still if you have a property you want to hold for the long term that will support the higher debt service of the 15 year amortization, 4.5% is a pretty nice rate. Plus if you Continue reading 10 Year Apartment Building Investment Loan Rate Now Below 4.5% on Falling Treasury

3 Things I Learned Charting Apartment Building & Commercial Real Estate Market Cycles

Seattle’s Strange Trip Through the Apartment Building Investment Cycle Part II

In part I we saw that some of the most widely followed market cycle research can’t be relied on without question. If knowing where we are in the market cycle is the most important thing (and not everyone agrees, see the comments from one of my private equity guys about that under part I here) then the best solution is probably to chart the cycles for the markets we’re investing in ourselves. If you’re in multiple CRE sectors in a lot of markets hopefully you have someone on your team or can hire a consultant (like Ashworth) to chart those cycles.

SEA occupancy v cycle position WTH
Click on images for full size.

Building our own CRE market cycle chart

To track a cycle for one market and sector we only need to answer five questions according to Professor Mueller’s methodology: Market occupancy, the 30 year Long Term Average (LTA) occupancy, rent growth, inflation and new unit construction. Later we’ll look at whether we can Continue reading 3 Things I Learned Charting Apartment Building & Commercial Real Estate Market Cycles