Who is buying all those properties and what does it mean for the apartment building investment cycle?

Mark Hickey of CoStar put out a piece looking at who was responsible for the near record $65.8B of apartment building investment in 2012. CoStar’s numbers show that private owners/developers did just about half of all acquisitions last year and institutions were in for 12%, both near their recent trends. REITs on the other hand increased their share by a third, responsible for 12% of sales volume last year.

Interestingly the sellers were pretty much the same groups, except REITs who were the largest net buyers last year.

Apartment Building Investment by REITs 2004 to 2012

Last year REITs raised 15x the equity they did in 2008 (and 20x the total capital). Up against pockets that deep Continue reading Who is buying all those properties and what does it mean for the apartment building investment cycle?

The Seasonal Effects on Apartment Building Effective Rents, Occupancy and Revenue Growth. Plus much more…

Axiometrics’ monthly apartment building investment report has a great chart showing the seasonal effects on effective rent, occupancy rate and revenue growth. How do you model seasonality in your budgets? What do you think is the best way to do this?

Seasonal Effects on Apartment Building Investment Results
Source: Axiometrics Inc.

Their report this month also has a very Continue reading The Seasonal Effects on Apartment Building Effective Rents, Occupancy and Revenue Growth. Plus much more…

How to make REOs-to-Rentals work: spin them into a REIT. Look out single family investors, here come the institutions.

Colony Capital has big plans for the REO-to-Rentals (RtR) sector. Not only do they want to buy 30,000 plus houses to rent them out, they also want to turn RtR into an institutional grade asset class. That has big implications for single family real estate investors who will now have deep pocketed competition that enjoys economies of scale.

Apartment Building Investment and Foreclosures
How Foreclosures Ate America. Click for interactive map from WNYC

Granted I was initially skeptical about single family homes becoming an institutional asset class but people said that about apartments twenty years ago too. In an interview printed in Institutional Real Estate Letter, Kevin Traenkle of Colony Capital maps out their strategy in pretty good detail, including what I think is Tom Barrack’s real genius piece, their exit plan of Continue reading How to make REOs-to-Rentals work: spin them into a REIT. Look out single family investors, here come the institutions.