Dive Brief:
- Brookfield Properties, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, acquired eight properties totaling 4,143 units from Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust for $845 million last month. CoStar first reported the story.
- The portfolio includes apartment communities in Las Vegas; Phoenix; Columbus, Ohio; and Charlotte and Chapel Hill in North Carolina — markets that have seen strong apartment supply recently.
- New York City-based Brookfield did not respond to a request for comment from Multifamily Dive, but a spokesperson for New York City-based private equity giant Blackstone said the transaction represents a “terrific outcome” for the firm’s investors and “demonstrates the strong institutional demand for well-located, quality assets.”
Dive Insight:
The Brookfield-BREIT deal is another sign that once-dormant apartment sales have been thawing in 2024 and that investors still covet housing.
“Rental housing remains one of our highest-conviction themes, and we continue to see strong fundamentals in attractive markets,” Brookfield’s spokesperson said.
Blackstone has been central to some of the biggest deals of 2024.
In April, Blackstone and Denver-based Apartment Income REIT Corp. announced that they had entered into an agreement where Blackstone Real Estate Partners X would acquire all outstanding common shares of AIR for approximately $10 billion, including the assumption of debt. AIR owns 27,010 units across 76 rental housing communities, concentrated primarily in coastal markets including Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Later in April, KKR and BREIT announced that funds managed by KKR would acquire a portfolio of 19 purpose-built student housing properties from BREIT for approximately $1.64 billion.
Overall, apartment sales increased 18% year over year in October, hitting $11 billion, according to a report that data firm MSCI Real Assets shared with Multifamily Dive. Apartment sales volume has grown relative to last year in four of the last five months, according to MSCI.
However, things still aren’t back to normal, with October’s figure 35% below the five-year average for the month before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Most of the activity that we've seen has been from larger groups, institutions, buying newer assets,” Jon Siegel, co-founder and chief investment officer at Bethesda, Maryland–based apartment owner RailField Partners, recently told Multifamily Dive. “I still feel like the value-add space and the older stuff is still behind on that, and still a little frozen. I think next year, we'll see more activity throughout the spectrum of multifamily.”
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