Apartment Investment Lifecycle

I want to talk about the four phases of apartment ownership when we’re talking about investments, specifically a syndication where we’re pooling capital from investors, going out and buying an apartment community as an investment. The first step is the acquisition process. As a passive investor, there’s really not any involvement on your part. There’s a lot of work on the sponsor’s part. They’re out there touring properties, underwriting properties, working with brokers, working with owners, underwriting a lot of different deals, making offers. A lot of these majorities, an overwhelming majority of these, don’t make sense or offers don’t get accepted, and that’s fine. We’re combing through lots and lots of deals to find one that’s going to meet our investment criteria and be a solid investment for our investors. Lots of work goes into the acquisition process, but as a passive investor, you’re not involved in that. Really, you’re seeing an offering memorandum come out on a project once the sponsor already has a project under contract, so that acquisition happens. Everybody comes together in terms of pooling capital and close on a property. That’s the acquisition process. Right after the acquisition process is the repositioning process. This is where we go into an apartment community and spend rehab dollars addressing things that are broken, might be fixing air conditioners or redoing parking lots, or replacing roofs, I mean you, you name it. Typically, a budget on a larger apartment community is anywhere from $500,000 to multimillion dollars in renovations that are budgeted, and you could see this on a per door basis anywhere from maybe $2,000 a door up to $10,000 per door, or north of that. Every project is different, but that is the reposition process going in, improving the community, fixing anything that’s wrong. You might be upgrading interiors, etc. Changing out the office or the gym or any number of things you might do to make the property more desirable and to fix anything that’s wrong with it, so that’s step two. After the reposition is complete, typically, there’s a whole period for cashflow. Once the property is fixed, it’s up and running. Maybe there’s a rebrand that happens, but now the property’s performing well, and we can hold onto that property for typically a few years for cashflow and give investment partners seven to 10% returns on their money paid quarterly, so that’s a great thing. We buy these things a lot of times for that cash flow, and we might hold onto it for a few years. That’s the third step. The fourth and final step is the disposition, of course, and this is taking the property after you’ve completed the reposition, improve the net operating income of the property, and now you have owned it for the cycle. You’ve completed your business plan and now it’s time to exit that property and pass it on to the next investor. This is typically where most of the gains are realized for investors, where investors are going to get all of their principal back plus any additional gains and that concludes the life cycle and then you can go out and do it again. Fairly simple process of acquisition, reposition, cashflow and disposition, and we just take that process and rinse and repeat over and over again to build wealth for the limited partners in the deal, and for the sponsor as well. Tried and true business model. It’s fairly simple as a concept. Obviously, there’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces that the sponsor and the construction crews and the property management teams are dealing with. There’s plenty of moving parts and lots of action throughout this cycle, but as a limited partner or a passive investor, that’s the high level overview of what a project lifecycle looks like. I hope that helps. Take care.