How to manage online apartment reviews. From the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference last week.
Filed under: Apartment Technology and Management, Multifamily Investments
“People are going to have these conversations with or without you,” Wade Hewitt, vice president, apartmentratings.com said. “Engagement can really be a difference maker.”
In addition to steering the conversation about your property, reviews can also be used to see what other communities are doing right. “Use reviews to find out about your competitors and about what people like,” Erica Galos-Alioto, vice president, local, Yelp, said.
Negative reviews can also be useful to property managers. “Every review has some truth,” Patrick Grandinetti, head of real estate, Google, said. “If not, someone wouldn’t have posted it. Getting a bad review is a fact of life… so if you get a bad review, it helps ground you in reality,” he said.
Ultimately the panelists agreed that the most important thing is to engage your residents. Read more
Apartment Building Investment Sales Jump 31% in Q1 2012 says Real Capital Analytics.
Filed under: Apartment Building Investment Cycle, Commercial Real Estate, Multifamily Investments
Apartment building investment sales continued their ascent in the first quarter of 2012, jumping 31 percent over the same time frame in 2011, according to New York–based commercial real estate research firm Real Capital Analytics (RCA).
- Garden properties, totaling $7.1 billion in sales, drove most of the volume
- High-rises rose $4.8 billion.
- Both sectors jumped 30 percent from a year ago.
- Portfolio deals also boosted the first-quarter totals, with 52 transactions involving 185 properties adding $2.6 billion in volume.
- Distressed sales provided 13 percent of total sales, a 9 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2011.
The volume trends are consistent across tertiary, primary, and secondary markets, but cap rate trends vary. In secondary markets, they remain unchanged; in tertiary markets, they’ve increased slightly; and in major markets, they’ve compressed.
See the whole MFE article: Apartment Sales Jump 31 Percent in Q1 2012
Tertiary markets still represent a value opportunity and at Ashworth Partners we’ve identified a few markets with unique drivers that catch the upswing. Contact us to find out more.
The secret to owning income producing apartment building investments in your IRA.
From the NY Times:
THE past couple of years have left many people staring in disbelief at the returns on their individual retirement accounts. Consider last year, when the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index finished the year essentially where it started.
So it makes sense that people are looking for ways to earn more for retirement — or to make up for losses. Yet when I heard that an increasing number of people were moving money from traditional I.R.A.’s to self-directed I.R.A.’s that focused on real estate, I was skeptical that this was a good idea.
First, I wondered, how could this be done with retirement money? Was it even legal? And were people who had worked and saved money for their retirement really putting it into real estate so soon after the bubble burst?
Could you really have a conservative investment in your IRA today that earns 6, 7, 8% or higher? That’s legal? Yes you can, here’s the secret that your Wall St. broker and banker don’t want you to know: You can open a Self-directed IRA. That is an IRA account set up with an independent Custodian who makes the investments you direct it to (clever name huh?) instead of steering you into the products that earn them the biggest commissions and bonuses.
Of course there are some limits on the kind of investments but we’re not looking to corner the market on Greek reverse CDO squared repos (whatever those are). We’re looking for good income, inflation protection and Read more
Denver Job Growth catching up with Apartment Building occupancy and rent gains.
Filed under: Commercial Real Estate, Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
Apartment building investment buoyed by job growth in Denver
Video via Property Management Insider: http://youtu.be/uFjpYSbVdRg
Apartment fundamentals are strong essentially across the board in Denver, which ranked among the nation’s best with year-over-year rent growth of 6.5%
M&M Apartment Building Investment call: Opportunities exist in secondary mkts & value add, tertiary still lagging
Filed under: Apartment Finance, Commercial Real Estate, Multifamily Investments
Marcus & Millichap Q1 call on the apartment building investment climate this morning:
- Year over year manufacturing jobs grew 238k. Manufacturing = 20% of GDP but gets no press, where as single family housing < 2% gets all the coverage.
- There is a historic % of 18-34 Y/Os still living ‘with the parents’ but they are also getting a larger proportion of the new jobs. (See chart) Good for apartment building investors as these people typically become renters when they do move out.
- A props in primary (coastal) markets seeing compressed cap rates; most on the call (including me) thought they were a little frothy.
- Nadji feels that if operations and NOI growth keep up, cap rates will remain Read more
Do you know the Walk Score for your Multifamily property? Should you check before your next acquisition?
Filed under: Multifamily Design & Development, Multifamily Investments
How do apartment building residents actually want to live? Do they want sidewalks in front of their apartments and actual places to walk to—“Leave the car in the garage!” is a common refrain on real estate sites—or are Americans happy, as transportation analyst Alan Pisarski puts it, to “drive to where they can walk?” The truth is there are relatively few places in America that today would pass what architect Hal Box has dubbed the “Popsicle Rule”—“a child must be able to walk safely from home to buy a Popsicle within five minutes.”
How ‘walkable’ is your property? Your next apartment building investment? How do you figure that out?
Walk Score is a website that takes a physical address—enter yours here—and computes, using proprietary algorithms and various data streams, a measure of its walkability. More recently it’s started tracking how transit-friendly neighborhoods are too. What drives the score is choice and proximity—the more amenities (restaurants, movie theaters, schools) you have around you, and the closer they are, the higher your Walk Score.
“In most metropolitan areas, only 5 to 10 percent of the housing stock is located Read more
Portland Apartment Building Market: occupancy drops but rents still rising according to report
Filed under: Apartment Building Investment Cycle, Multifamily Investments
Apartments are a little easier to come by in the Portland area, but that’s not slowing down rent increases across much of the market.
According to the Metro Multifamily Housing Association which released its latest survey Wednesday:
- Vacancy across the metro area grew to 3.72% from 3.34% late last year.
- Rents climbed 3% in the same period, reaching $1 a square foot per month across the metro area.
- Average two-bedroom unit now rents for $771, up $28 a month compared with six months earlier.
The Portland area has one of the lowest Read more
Will REO-rentals Really Compete With Apartment Building Investments?
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, REOs to Rentals- Single Family, The Economy and Current Affairs
Greg Willett, VP of research over at Real Page wrote a nice piece on that which covers it nicely; take it away Greg:
Thanks to one sentence uttered by Warren Buffett and some major overplay by the media, single-family rentals are a hot investment choice now. Thus, the analysts at MPF Research are fielding a constant stream of inquiries about whether the bulk sale of bank-owned single-family homes to investors who will operate them as rentals will impact the apartment sector.
Our take is that Read more
Clash of housing bottom fairy tales: Big Bad Wolves v. Robin Hood Investors.
Filed under: Multifamily Investments, The Economy and Current Affairs
My friend and fellow real estate investor Mei was asking about competition for single family REOs from big institutional players buying them at the courthouse as in the Bloomberg article here. The article profiles Waypoint, a Southern California real estate investing outfit that has developed some great technology to facilitate buying and leasing REOs. Check out Waypoint’s website, it’s the best example I’ve seen of the lease/option, credit repair, rent-to-own strategy for real estate investors.
It is a great question and one that I’d been wondering about too. Just so happens I was meeting with one of my private equity clients last week and we had a long conversation about that very subject. My client is the real estate/mortgage specialist at a 50B firm and they’ve been trying to crack this market profitably for about a year. Here’s the bottom line: Private equity needs to earn Read more
Handy Apartment Building Investment Market Reports- interactive one-pagers from Reis Reports.
Reis puts out these really handy one page reports with all the major QoQ changes broken out by sub-market. Here’s the latest on Portland, OR:
Click on the image above to go to a list of markets then select Read more
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