Trepp's September numbers came out last week, and multifamily crossed a line it has not crossed since Covid. The multifamily CMBS delinquency rate hit 8.04 percent, above the overall CMBS rate of 8.02 percent, up 471 basis points in two years. Rents, meanwhile, are up 1.5 percent year over year according to Apartments.com. The apartment market is finally being priced, and the prices are not coming from appraisals. They are coming through the back door: workouts, retrades and liquidations. The...
26 days ago • 3 min read
On September 4, 2026, Mandel Group agreed to merge 13 owned and operated multifamily properties, valued at $614 million, into Cottonwood Communities, a non-traded net asset value (NAV) real estate investment trust (REIT), in exchange for units in Cottonwood's operating partnership (OP) and cash. Most coverage will file this under portfolio consolidation, a REIT buying scale and a fee stream from a private operator ready to monetize. I think there's more going on here. Both firms are also...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Good schools do not grow NOI, and the reason is a basis problem. Columbia Business School's Milstein Center published a study on August 3, 2026, by Michael Steinberg of MetLife Investment Management and Christopher Munsell of Columbia, that has been circulating through commercial real estate newsletters since mid-August. They tested one of the most durable assumptions in multifamily investing, that a property assigned to better schools should produce better net operating income (NOI) growth....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Family offices are supposedly cutting real estate, from roughly 11% of portfolios down to 8%. Read as a single number, that looks like a retreat. It's not. Inside that number are two opposite moves: family offices are shrinking core and office exposure while buying multifamily at 20 to 30% discounts to replacement cost and adding data centers and logistics. One allocation percentage cannot describe two opposite strategies, and averaging them erases the story. The number hides a barbell Every...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Why Family Offices Are Becoming Property Companies, Not Fund LPs The mechanics now favor direct ownership over fund LP positions on every axis that matters to a family office. Three reasons why. Structure beats speed. Family offices closed 55 direct real estate transactions in the first half of 2026, across 39 buyers, according to FINTRX. Thirty-one of those buyers were single-family offices, versus eight multi-family offices. SFOs have no investment committee cycle, no fund duration clock,...
3 months ago • 1 min read
While I generally believe that rent control is a bad idea, there are gradiations of horrible. That said, rent control done well and rent control done badly are sitting side by side right now, and the contrast is instructive. Jersey City ties its annual cap to CPI or 4%, whichever is lower. Capital improvements at vacancy get a fixed, self-executing surcharge, $1.35 per $100 of cost up to $5,000 and $1.55 per $100 above that, no board hearing required. Spend $10,000 renovating a unit at...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Alright, this one's fun. I've been knee-deep in battery storage proposals lately. While I get the basic concept of "buy electricity when it's cheap, and use it when it would be expensive", we're a long way from just going to Home Depot, buying one, and plugging it in. I've been evaluating a battery energy storage system (BESS) installation at an office building we manage in New Jersey for a family office client through my property management company, Metropolitan America. Three vendors, three...
4 months ago • 1 min read
It's been a while since my last newsletter. Life and deal flow got in the way, but I'm back. Three things. I'm looking for real estate family business or family office principals and executives willing to sit for a short interview. These conversations feed directly into the "Real Estate Family Business Management" course I teach at New York University. I'm looking for anecdotes, stories, and context on succession, governance, and control. If you or someone in your network fits that profile...
4 months ago • 1 min read