As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, inflation concerns, and the war in Ukraine illustrate, it can be difficult to decide where and how to invest money in volatile environments. As we like to say, we don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future; instead, we focus on the bigger picture to help us identify opportunities. We believe that the multi-family sector – long a bedrock of our real estate investment strategies – deserves investors’ attention in 2022.

In our previous blog, we covered the phenomenon of how a macro real estate bull market erupted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as we (hopefully) begin to come out the other side, the question becomes: how should an investor approach this environment?

Across the board, real estate prices have been increasing, and multi-family assets are no exception. These higher prices have investors looking at low purchase cap rates. Certainly, these factors need to be considered; however, we also believe they should be put into context with what may be on the horizon for multi-family assets.   

The fallout from a Black Swan event, like the COVID-19 pandemic, can manifest itself in counter-intuitive ways. The economic devastation seen throughout the world in 2020 is undeniable; yet, amidst the havoc, we also witnessed one of the biggest booms in housing prices in U.S. history. According to the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which tracks price changes of single-family homes, housing prices rose 9.5% from November 2019 to November 2020. How does this happen while we’re simultaneously dealing with the worst pandemic in 100 years?

July 15th is likely a day circled on the calendar of many people looking to complete a 1031 exchange.  When the IRS issued Notice 2020-23, exchange transactions that fell between March 31, 2020 and prior to July 15, 2020 saw their deadline extended to July 15, 2020. In light of the COVID pandemic, the IRS issued this notice to provide extra time to complete an exchange.  Certainly, I think we all were hopeful that by this time the worst of the pandemic would be behind us. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.  

This is the third part of a series on COVID-19. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

COVID-19 continues to bring uncertainty to commercial real estate and 1031 exchanges. Our assessment of risk within the sector is represented in this image.

This is the second part of a series on COVID-19. Read Part 1 here.

As is the case with all economic disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic will likely vary in its impact on different types of commercial real estate. At times like these, it's important to remember that the impact of disruptions related to Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) depends on the impact to the asset that the DST is invested in. These difficult and uncertain economic times serve as a reminder as to why our firm and our broker dealer spend so much time and energy on property-level and sponsor due diligence.    

This is the first part of a series on COVID-19. 

The COVID–19 pandemic will long be remembered as an event that has forever changed many of the ways we live, socialize, work, and play. The novel coronavirus plays no favorites and is almost boundless in its ability to affect every part of our economy.

Good friends and clients have asked me about how I think the real estate industry will be impacted, first at a macro-level and then more specifically for the 1031 exchange industry and Delaware Statutory Trust investors.