Multifamily investment could be showing signs of slowing down as we head into the back half of the year, as investors ease up on their appetite for garden-style properties.
According to a research report from CBRE and data from Real Capital Analytics, overall multifamily investment activity took a 6.9% tumble year-over-year in the second quarter.
Overall sales for the quarter came in at $34.5 billion and cap rates edged down to 5.5%.
The report chalks this up to a $3.9 million or 15% YoY decline in garden-style property acquisitions. This is a total reversal of last year’s trend when investors could not get enough garden-style into their portfolios.
The big performer for multifamily in Q2 was mid-/high-rise investment which posted $12.4 billion in sales in Q2, up 12.2% YoY. This could have been the fruition of a trend that surfaced earlier this year where investors were showing interest in slightly distressed, urban core product struggling to compete with the glut of supply in some urban cores.
CBRE investment sales pros note that despite this reversal of last year’s trend, interest in value-add, garden-style properties is still strong, making up most of the investment activity in Q2 despite its slow down.
This likely indicates that, though investors still prefer this garden-style, value-add opportunities, competition for these properties has finally driven sale prices to the point where the pool of investors with the capacity or appetite for that level of investment is quickly shrinking.
Of the investment activity that did take place, Los Angeles and New York soaked up the lion’s share with roughly $3.3 billion and $3.1 billion in multifamily investment volume, respectively. Dallas-Fort Worth came in a distant third at $1.7 billion in multifamily investment volume, still on its red-hot multifamily streak thanks to a booming local economy.
