FIRST DRAFT LIVE: Have We Reached The End Of The Bid-Ask Standoff?

Bisnow’s First Draft Live is a regular series featuring live conversations about the critical stories impacting CRE right now. It is a companion to The First Draft, Bisnow’s daily, flagship CRE newsletter. Register here to get The First Draft in your inbox. Subscribe to First Draft Live on Apple and Spotify, or scroll down to view in your browser.

For the last three years, commercial real estate has been defined by a bid-ask standoff.

Stubborn sellers and cautious buyers have been keeping deals stalled. But it looks like things are starting to change as institutional capital is moving in a bigger way. 

Take Affinius Capital, which closed a $3.4B take-private of Veris Residential on the heels of active deployments across data center and industrial markets. While others were waiting on the sidelines, Affinius has been moving forward. What did it see that other firms didn’t? 

To answer that question, Bisnow Editor-in-Chief Mark F. Bonner sat down with Affinius Capital partner Ryan Krauch on this week’s First Draft Live. 

Krauch said the Veris deal represents a change in thesis for Affinius and perhaps for the industry. In the cycle of zero interest rates and constant cap rate compression, multifamily investment had moved away from basics, he said.

“[Housing] is not meant to be tactical, opportunistic, high-yielding plays,” Krauch said. “Multifamily, from its origins, has really been more about income producing, downside protection, diversified income, inflation hedge, all the traditional things.

“So for us, when we looked at Veris, this was a great opportunity to really reset that framework.”

Krauch also said that over the last several decades, whenever there were the kinds of declines in values like those over the last few years, the next three to four years tended to bring some of the most successful and productive returns for investors. 

Watch the video below to view the full conversation: