Evaluating an Investment – Conservative Rent Growth

Conservative rent growth is something that you’re going to want to pay attention to as you’re investing. I’m sorry, investigating a possible multi-family investment. You want to see rent growth. We don’t ever underwrite more than 3% year over year, except maybe in year one if we go in and we do a heavy lift value add and rents are way below market. Well, we might see a larger bump that first year, because we’re doing a lot of visible improvements to the property, but over time, beyond that, some markets are growing at 4, 5, 6, 7% annual rent increases. You can’t assume that into the future. We don’t know that that’s going to happen, so we typically underwrite a 2 to 3% annual rent increase and then we try to stress test it too. If we don’t see those things, are we still going to be okay with the investment if we don’t see the 2 or 3% annual growth? So that’s one of the metrics, is conservative rent increases that you’re going to want to see or ask your sponsor as you evaluate multi-family investments to potentially [inaudible 00:01:02] some capital in.