Two big commercial real estate players have created a joint venture to buy apartment buildings up and down the East Coast.

Invesco’s global real estate arm has joined forces with Maryland-based Bozzuto to create a $330M investment platform for multifamily assets, with an investment capacity of up to $1B, the firms announced Thursday.

“Performance is our top priority when investing on behalf of our clients,” Invesco Real Estate Managing Director and Head of U.S. Transactions Greg Kraus said in a statement. “This venture is anticipated to capitalize on recovering market fundamentals focusing on assets possessing multiple value creation levers.”

While the joint venture didn’t provide more specific geographies, it has already made its first acquisition with a 220-unit apartment community called Enders Place at Baldwin Park in Orlando, Florida, with plans to upgrade the units to drive value.

Invesco Real Estate has $85B in assets under management across the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. It is a subsidiary of the $1.5T Atlanta-based investment giant. Bozzuto has developed and owns tens of thousands of multifamily units and manages more than 130,000, it said in the release.

“The capital and partnership framework provides the financial flexibility and strategic alignment necessary to navigate evolving market conditions,” Bozzuto President and CEO Toby Bozzuto said in a statement.

Bert Crouch, portfolio manager and head of North America for Invesco Real Estate, told Bisnow at the start of the year that the environment was ripe for more real estate investment after several years of postpandemic uncertainty. The fund manager had focused more on lending since the rise in interest rates.

“Our No. 1 conviction has been in credit because of the relative value,” Crouch said in January. “We are now starting to see more and more opportunity on the equity side.”

Investors have started to become more aggressive about buying apartments as the record construction pipeline emerging from the pandemic has ebbed. Fewer than 500,000 units were underway across the country at the end of June for the first time since 2017, according to Cushman & Wakefield.