Dive Brief:
- Despite economic turbulence related to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, apartment sales volume rose 20% year over year to $9.2 billion in April, according to a report that data firm MSCI Real Assets shared with Multifamily Dive.
- The RCA commercial property price indexes fell 1% YOY in April, according to MSCI. That was an improvement compared to a year ago, when values had fallen at a 7.3% annual pace.
- Garden apartment transactions rose by 4% to $5.2 billion in April. Mid- and high-rise property sales increased 50% YOY to $4 billion. Single-property sales, which drove the market in the first quarter of 2025, fell 2% to $6.9 billion in April. Portfolio and entity-level trades more than offset that decline by jumping 267% to $2.3 billion.
Dive Insight:
Apartment executives are optimistic that the sales market will gain momentum as 2025 continues.
“The institutional sales market in the first quarter was reasonably busy, with volumes higher than a year ago, but still below pre-COVID volume levels,” Equity Residential CEO Mark Parrell said on the Chicago-based REIT’s first-quarter earnings call in late April. “Asset prices so far seem unaffected by higher rates and uncertainty.”
Still, EQR maintained its guidance of $1.5 billion in acquisitions and $1 billion of dispositions in 2025. “When we gave guidance, we expected to transact very little in the first quarter, and that was the case,” Parrell said.
Essex Property Trust made $345 million in acquisitions in Northern California, which were funded by dispositions in Southern California. However, Rylan Burns, executive vice president and chief investment officer at Essex, noted that bidding was aggressive in the firm’s West Coast markets.
“We’re trying to be prudent and take swings where we see a fat pitch,” Burns said. “Since April 2, there have been limited data points, but the feedback from the brokers and several deals we're tracking is that there's really been limited changes in terms of market participation.”
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