Buyers in 2021 underwrote about 5.7% a year of rent growth. Same-store rents grew 1.4% a year over the five years that followed, and every published forecast for 2025 was too high by two to three points. This note runs the representative $24M deal on the underwritten path and the real one, assembles the forecast record, and finds that a deal bought today needs 3.5% a year to return 12% against a market delivering 0.9%.
CBRE's underwriting survey has set the multifamily exit cap 12 to 36 bps above the going-in rate for four years. Transaction cap rates went from 4.70% to 5.75% over the same period. This note sells the representative $24M deal at five exit caps (the survey convention returns 12.5%, the market returned 5.4% and 0.88x), sorts out which of four published cap rates belongs where in the model, and ties the exit cap to the ten-year and its spread.
Same-store apartment revenue rose 14% from 2021 to 2024, expenses rose 20%, and NOI rose 10%, which is exactly what a 3% pro forma predicted, for the wrong reasons. This note shows which lines did it, what the expense line cost the representative $24M deal (about $1.35M of value), and what happens to NOI over the next five years at today's 0.9% rent growth.
Brokers agree a building with a 2021 agency loan is worth more than one without, and that buyers should pay less than the full interest saving. Nobody publishes the number. This note solves for it on the $24M building from our earlier notes: a 3.75% loan with five years left is worth $1.8M to a buyer, 8% of market value, and the premium has doubled since February.
About $297B of multifamily loans mature in 2026, most of it bridge and securitized debt from 2021–22. This note takes a $24M building bought at the Q4 2021 average cap rate with a 75% bridge loan and sizes its replacement today: $18.0M due, $12.1M available, a $5.9M gap. Then it prices the owner's four options and what the gap means for a buyer.
The 10-year has moved 121 bps since February while apartment cap rates have sat near 5.75%, so agency debt at 6.3–7.2% now costs more than the asset yields. This note runs a representative $24M deal through it: year-one cash-on-cash at 65% LTV falls from 3.6% to 1.8%, agency sizing drops from 66% to 58% LTV, and levered IRR still pencils — which is the trap.
Nobody publishes a benchmark for GP back-office spend. This note assembles one from vendor price lists, fund-formation guides and compensation surveys — legal, K-1s, fund admin, software, compliance and analyst labor — and adds it up for three sponsor profiles: roughly $86K, $260K and $506K a year, with the smallest sponsors paying the highest share of fee income.
A multifamily acquisition model rests on a handful of market inputs set once at the start of underwriting. This note measures how much three of them — debt cost, rent-growth forecasts, and transaction activity — actually moved during 2025–2026, then runs a representative deal through the observed changes: enough to cut the 5-year levered IRR by up to 470 bps.
