The seller in that case was a family that had inherited the properties when the father died. The place was crazy with unpaid rent and mounting expenses the kids didn’t want to deal with. It was a big complex and the sale was in the tens of millions. I don’t know the details beyond that, it isn’t in my area, it was just told to me by the friend because their bank handled the transaction. The advice was to follow the smart money and wait for Congress.
I live in a rural area but we have a large renter base with a college in town and a military base nearby, but I am not hearing any stories of rentals being scooped up by big players. I was looking at some houses next to campus asking in the $100k range, some already subdivided into apartments. Land prices, on the other hand, are up over 500% in the 8 years since I moved here, now running over $10k/acre. I think that is driven by people from the nearest Democrat run, minority heavy city 45 minutes away looking for a place to escape to.
I have it on good authority that BX is focusing on 18 hour cities so anything that’s remotely rural wouldn’t be included. Anything around $100k wouldn’t even be on their radar. Due diligence cost alone is just too high to justify unless a lot in one deal. I am not that familiar with land pricing.
We have a couple board members that run or on boards for multi fam REITs and they are doing great. I also get a lot of that chatter from a few Research analysts that also cover hotels as well. I think if your friend had hired JLL or CBRE he’d probably have sold for a lot more. Also depends on timing too. The transaction market went nuts late last year in CRE, so if he sold or started before then he just was unlucky on timing