eXp Commercial is one of the fastest-growing national commercial real estate brokerage firms. The Chicago Multifamily Brokerage Division focuses on listing and selling multifamily properties throughout the Chicago Area and Suburbs.
Architecture, engineering, and construction firms express a telling forecast, according to PSM
Proposal activity for single-family homes and residential developments plummeted in the third quarter but remained solid for multifamily-for-rent and senior/assisted living properties, according to PSMJ Resources’ Quarterly Market Forecast (QMF) survey of architecture, engineering, and construction (A/E/C) firm leaders.
David Burstein, PE, director and senior consultant at PSMJ, an A/E/C industry consulting and publishing firm said he’s seeing a divergence in the A/E housing markets.
“The homeownership markets – new single-family homes, condos, and subdivisions – are feeling the effects of higher interest rates and tighter lending policies,” Burstein said. “The rental markets aren’t feeling the same pinch, at least not yet.”
Even Multifamily Index Cooling Some
Burstein often highlights the influence that the housing sector has on all markets served by A/E/C firms, estimating that it directly or indirectly impacts approximately 80 percent of the industry’s total revenue.
Even though multifamily proposal activity continues to be relatively strong, the index has cooled somewhat, likely due to the rising cost of borrowing money to finance new projects, says Burstein.
PSMJ created the net plus/minus index (NPMI) to measure proposal activity and assess the A/E/C market outlook when it began its QMF survey in 2003. The NPMI is the delta between the percentage of respondents in a given category seeing an increase in proposal activity for the quarter, and those experiencing a decrease.
For several quarters after the initial rebound from the COVID-19-related downturn in late 2020, all segments of the housing market reported proposal activity at elevated levels rarely seen in the history of the QMF.
In Q1 2020, the overall housing market’s NPMI fell well into the negative (minus 19.3), but rebounded to set its record-high index score of 77.4 one year later.
Single-Family and Condo Proposal Activity Sinking
Activity remained robust across the board in the first half of 2022, but the Q3 report saw housing’s NPMI fall 33.6 index points (from 55.0 to 21.4), quarter over quarter, and 49.1 points, year over year.
More telling are the results from the five submarkets measured in the survey. While multifamily (NPMI of 44.8) and senior/assisted living (17.0) remained positive in Q3, proposal activity for single-family individual homes (-2.4), single-family developments (-3.9), and condominiums (-6.8) all sank into negative territory.
PSMJ chose proposal activity because it is among the earliest stages of the design and construction project lifecycle, thereby offering a look at the longer-term outlook for markets, submarkets, and the overall industry.
During a quick-fire session geared towards the experienced transactional investor at the GlobeSt. Multifamily national conference Monday morning, a panel of experts examined current multifamily transactions and deconstructed various challenges and opportunities given the current state of the market.
LOS ANGELES—“We are going through a tricky time. It has never been more important to focus on the basis when looking at a transaction.” Those thoughts are according to panelist Bobby Khorshidi, president and chief credit officer at Archway Capital.
Khorshidi joined other multifamily experts during a transactions panel Monday morning at the GlobeSt. Multifamily national conference event here at the JW Marriott LA LIVE. Moderator Laurie Lustig-Bower, an EVP at CBRE, began with asking panelists what is happening with bridge debt.
Interest rates have gone up and there will be some uncomfortable conversations between lenders and their borrowers and between investment sales and their clients, explained Khorshidi. “In underwriting, we have to apply a stress test because we don’t know where things are going to go. It is hard to find deals that will pencil.”
UNDEWRITING, WHAT ARE THE METRICS?
His company is using 7% as the exit on transactions. “We are looking at construction loans that are coming due or over budget and they are looking difficult to find exit financing,” he explained. “This is a transitional period where we are going to find new footing… It will just take time to figure out the new normal.”
When underwriting deals today, James D’Argenio, senior principal of acquisitions at The Bascom Group, said that what hasn’t changed is understanding a property’s characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. “Something that has changed is maybe the metrics, but we are really trying to stick to the basics and the stuff that we can control.”
When asked at a class A building versus a B-minus fixer-upper, and what cap rates would be looked at for each, D’Argenio said that they don’t make any money off the cap rate and are return focused. “We are trying to focus on levered versus unlevered returns…not just what is our cap rate to our coupon is because then you will be waiting a long time to transact… I don’t think that is an important metric when you are looking at the total success a project can have.”
BUYERS AND SELLERS ADJUST
Buyers and sellers have to adjust to the new normal, say panelists. Panelist Otto Ozen, executive vice president at The Mogharebi Group, said that the rapid interest rate increase created a bit of dysfunction. “Sellers historically have been relatively slow to respond to these kinds of shifts,” he said. “That is where you have the gap between buyers and sellers.”
He continued that buyers are quick to adapt their response and continue to adjust. “What is happening though is that a year ago, assumption of debt was really not an attractive option,” Ozen said. ‘What looked unattractive a year ago is being revisited.”
David Harrington, EVP and managing director of Matthews Real Estate Investment Services added that the profile of buyers right now are the ones who are able to stomach the long-term horizon.
LENDING OPTIONS
Switching gears, Lustig–Bower asked panelists about lending and what options look like for the buyer on bridge debt. Khorshidi explained that the goalpost is shifting. “We are in the business of lending and are going to lend.”
Having said that, he explained that his company needs to anticipate where the market is going. “Fundamentals and the economy feel like business as usual other than the fact that rates have moved,” he said. “Everyone will use the same criteria and the same underwriting.”
This is eerily familiar to the beginning of Covid, he continued, but then, the issue was valuation.” It is similar now. We just need to figure out the bid/ask. That is the way that we are underwriting things. The challenge is to figure out how someone is going to refinance.”
Khorshidi noted that it is a weird transitory time and it will take some time for these conversations to flush out. The pace that rates have been going up have been really extreme and has put some uncertainty in the markets and without trust in the Fed, it is hard to know where things are going. “We were told that all of this was transitory. That is not how it has played out. As lenders, and you all out there as investors, you have to guess, and whoever guesses right wins.”
September Marked Turning Point for Multifamily Rents
Year-over-year rent increases slowed but are still up 8.8 percent last month.
September apartment rents are down month-over-month, in what experts from Rent.com call “a hopeful sign” the market is stabilizing.
Year-over-year rent increases slowed but are still up 8.8 percent last month; in August, rent prices increased by 12.3 percent. September also marks the first time year-over-year changes dipped into the single digits since September 2021 and the lowest year-over-year increase since October 2021.
In addition, 61 percent of state-level markets saw decreased rents in September compared to the prior month, with New York posting the largest decrease at just over 17 percent month-over-month followed by Illinois and Massachusetts at 4.6 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. In addition, 31 of the 50 metros analyzed by Rent.com were down month-over-month, led by Cincinnati and Columbus with increases of nearly 7 and 6 percent. Median rent is also down month over month in 60 percent of markets surveyed, in what analysts call a “promising sign of a market beginning to cool.”
New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Oregon showed year-over-year declines, with just New York and Wisconsin down by more than a full percentage point at -10.01 percent and -7.39 percent respectively.
Jeff Adler, VP of Yardi Matrix and industry principal of self-storage at Yardi, recently told GlobeSt.com that “suburbs in major gateway metros and migration market favorites have seen greater rent growth since the start of the pandemic, but that the direction going forward is more balanced.”
The GlobeSt. Multifamily national conference kicked off with standing room only, complete with a new agenda at a new venue as some of the most influential dealmakers in multifamily came together to discuss the state of the industry.
LOS ANGELES—The GlobeSt. Multifamily national conference kicked off this morning with a state of the industry panel that brought together the most influential dealmakers in the U.S. multifamily real estate market. The panelists discussed key trends, major market shifts, the impacts of inflation on the multifamily sector, the road to economic recovery, and their expectations for another record year in multifamily.
Moderated by John Sebree, SVP and national director of multifamily at Marcus & Millichap, the panel kicked things off by making one thing clear: while many are trying to figure out if we are in a recession yet or not, fundamentals in multifamily are “still fairly strong.”
Still, it is undeniable that the sector is facing some headwinds.
According to panelist Robert LaFever, managing director of development at Greystar, the company is still actively pursuing deals and are studying macro locations, he said, but is being “much more selective.”
Chad Sanderson, senior principal of business development and acquisitions at the Bascom Group, advised that the industry needs to “buckle up, because there will be pain, but you have to do what you have to do.” He also said it has never been more important than ever to study the characteristics of a particular deal because there are so many moving pieces. “A lot of things coming out on the market right now are just not trading. There are times when you can have a macro approach to markets…you have to be mindful of supply, are there specific sectors that have higher unemployment. If those things are in check, then you are looking at the specific deal… Just getting a loan right now has changed so dramatically and that is driving your underwriting.”
Sanderson added that you have to think about your strategy, think about how to mitigate risk with uncertainty and figure out how to manage your investment portfolio. “Everyone had their thoughts of how things were going to unfold. One camp said that inflation and rates will come back down but then inflation took off even further.”
Next year, the environment should stabilize, especially as interest rates are expected to level off, said panelist Jeff Adler, VP of Yardi Matrix and industry principal of self-storage at Yardi. On the rental front, panelist Adler also recently told GlobeSt.com that “Suburbs in major gateway metros and migration market favorites have seen greater rent growth since the start of the pandemic, but that the direction going forward is more balanced.”
He says that there has been a recovery in the downtown areas back to pre-pandemic levels (except for San Francisco, although rents have rebounded from their previous lows). The spread between urban and suburban living (monthly rental rates) has narrowed, as well as the spread Between Gateway and Sunbelt cities, “although it still exists,” Adler says.
We have seen an incredible shift of people to these tertiary markets, added Sanderson. “I think inflation really caught a lot of people by surprise,” added Sanderson. “We are in this new paradigm where everyone’s mood has really changed.”
We are not going back to the way things were in terms of return to office and renter profile, explained Adler. In terms of demand, it has started to tail down, as the absorption-to-completion ratio in 2022 is a sharp reversal from the strong levels of household formation a year ago. “Many of these renter suburbs belong to the Miami, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles metros… Suburban living has been rewritten throughout the past decade.”
Kitty Wallace senior executive VP at Collier's, says that while there have been many people leaving the state of California, they are now coming back. “Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, have always been top markets but during Covid, they went to bottom markets,” she said. “I look at my international investors, and they might take a lower market return with less risk to be where they want to be…while we have seen movement out of state, many have come back.” She added that “We had unfortunate legislation here in California that impeded our growth during the beginning of Covid, but some of that is coming back because it is where people want to be. We are working with about 15%-20% of buyers now as compared to before.”
The increasing cost of capital and mounting concerns about ex-ante exit cap rates will ultimately drive buyers’ bids lower.
The increasing cost of capital is squeezing multifamily cap rates, which have been on a steady decline throughout the course of the pandemic.
According to a new analysis from Moody’s Analytics, that will ultimately pressure property values in the sector — and “without continued unprecedented rent growth, the darling multifamily asset class likely carries the most risk of value decline while the benchmark US Treasury rate is on the rise,” analysts say.
“Although Q3 has finally started to show a slight increase for industrial, office, and retail, cap rates have remained sticky. For multifamily, cap rates have continued to decline, which, along with tremendous rent growth, has propped up multifamily values compared to equities and other investments,” Moody’s Kevin Fagan and Xiaodi Li write. “But the increasing cost of capital and mounting concerns about ex-ante exit cap rates will ultimately drive buyers’ bids lower and property yields higher for the multifamily sector. So, multifamily property values will face pressure from both the Fed pushing rates and banks following suit with loan interest rates.”
The Moody’s economists note that rising 10-year treasury rates have pushed CMBS loan interest rates much higher than in recent months, and both are predicted to continue to climb. But while industrial’s cap rate started to climb up in Q3 2022, multifamily continued to decline. As of Q3, spreads between cap rates and loan interest rates for the sector clocked in at 0.76% — and Fagan and Li say that “cap rates with tight spreads are highly likely to increase under the upward pressure of rising interest rates.” That begs the question, they say, of how much rent growth is needed to curb a decline in value.
“Assuming the initial cap rate as 5%…if a CRE investor wants to exit in five years and the cap rate rises from 5% to 6.5%, the average annual rent growth needs to be higher than 5.4%,” they say. “Otherwise, the exit value will be lower than the current value. Though annual growth rates were 8.2% for multifamily from Q3 2021 to Q3 2022, a sustained average growth rate of 5.4% is well above any historical precedent.”
Ultimately, the pair say tight cap rate spreads and rising rates are “warning signs.”
“We will keep a close eye on those numbers,” they say.
Gross domestic product increased 0.6 percent after two quarters of decline, but key components continue to show an economic slowdown.
The U.S. economy grew slowly over the summer, adding to fears of a looming recession — but also keeping alive the hope that one might be avoided.
Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, returned to growth in the third quarter after two consecutive quarterly contractions, according to government data released on Thursday. But consumer spending slowed as inflation ate away at households’ buying power, and the sharp rise in interest rates led to the steepest contraction in the housing sector since the first months of the pandemic.
The report underscored the delicate balance facing the Federal Reserve as it tries to rein in the fastest inflation in four decades. Policymakers have aggressively raised interest rates in recent months — and are expected to do so again at their meeting next week — in an effort to cool off red-hot demand, which they believe has contributed to the rapid increase in prices. But they are trying to do so without snuffing out the recovery entirely.
The third-quarter data — G.D.P. rose 0.6 percent, the Commerce Department said, a 2.6 percent annual rate of growth — suggested that the path to such a “soft landing” remained open but narrow.
“It’s just a very hard needle to thread,” said Diane Swonk, the chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG. “The cracks in the foundation have already begun to show.”
President Biden cheered the report in a statement on Thursday morning. “For months, doomsayers have been arguing that the U.S. economy is in a recession, and congressional Republicans have been rooting for a downturn,” he said. “But today we got further evidence that our economic recovery is continuing to power forward.”
By one common definition, the U.S. economy entered a recession when it experienced two straight quarters of shrinking G.D.P. at the start of the year. Officially, however, recessions are determined by a group of researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, who look at a broader array of indicators, including employment, income and spending.
Inflation F.A.Q.
Card 1 of 5
What is inflation? Inflation is a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.
What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.
Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.
Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.
Most analysts don’t believe the economy meets that more formal definition, and the third-quarter numbers — which slightly exceeded forecasters’ expectations — provided further evidence that a recession had not yet begun.
But the overall G.D.P. figures were skewed by the international trade component, which often exhibits big swings from one period to the next. Economists tend to focus on less volatile components, which have showed the recovery steadily losing momentum as the year has progressed. One closely watched measure suggested that private-sector demand stalled out almost completely in the third quarter, and some forecasters expect G.D.P. to contract in the final three months of the year.
“Ignore the headline number — growth rates are slowing,” said Michael Gapen, the chief U.S. economist for Bank of America. “It wouldn’t take much further slowing from here to tip the economy into a recession.”
Consumer spending, the bedrock of the U.S. economy, rose 0.4 percent in the third quarter, down from a 0.5 percent increase in the quarter before. Spending on goods fell for the third consecutive quarter, while spending on services slowed but remained positive.
Consumer spending has continued to increase despite higher interest rates and rising prices, as consumers have drawn down savings to keep spending on vacations, restaurant meals and other in-person activities that many missed out on earlier in the pandemic. But it is unclear how long that can last. Americans saved 3.3 percent of their after-tax income in the third quarter, the smallest share since 2007.
“‘Borrowed time’ is how I would describe the consumer right now,” said Tim Quinlan, a senior economist at Wells Fargo. “Credit card borrowing is up, saving is down, our costs are rising faster than our paychecks are.”
Inflation slowed in the third quarter, as oil prices fell. That led to an increase in inflation-adjusted personal income, after a decline in the second quarter. But oil prices have since rebounded somewhat, and prices for food, rent and other essentials continue to rise.
The impact of rising interest rates is clear in the housing market, where home building and sales have both slowed sharply in recent months. The housing sector shrank 7.4 percent in the third quarter, subtracting 1.4 percentage points from the annualized growth rate in overall G.D.P. Businesses also cut investments in commercial and industrial buildings, and separate data released on Thursday showed that a key measure of business investment fell in September.
The slowdown in housing is likely to lead to a further pullback in consumer spending as homeowners feel poorer and as fewer people buy homes and need to fill them with furniture and appliances. Mortgage rates passed 7 percent on Thursday, their highest level since 2002.
“Housing is just the single largest trigger to additional spending, and it’s not there anymore; it’s going in reverse,” Ms. Swonk of KPMG said. “This has been a stunning turnaround in housing, and when things start to go really quickly, you start to wonder, what are the knock-on effects, what are the spillover effects?”
Thor Kitchen, a seller of stainless-steel kitchen appliances, saw strong demand early in the pandemic as families, stuck at home, were eager to upgrade their living spaces. Meeting that demand was a bigger challenge: Snarled supply chains made it hard for the company to get its products from its factories in China to its customers in the United States.
Understand Inflation and How It Affects You
Now, those trends are reversing. Supply chains are beginning to return to normal, and Thor Kitchen’s warehouses are beginning to fill up with inventory that the company ordered months ago. Demand, however, is falling: The steep drop in home sales means that fewer people need new stoves and refrigerators, while fear of a possible recession is leading people to pull back their spending.
“A lot of companies are going to be sitting on a lot of products that are now not moving,” said Timothy Lee, the company’s marketing manager. “We made those orders when demand was really high and continuing to increase in June.”
The company, which is based outside Riverside, Calif., has been cutting spending on advertising, among other areas, and has scaled back hiring, moves that Mr. Lee said were made early in expectation of a slowdown. It also recently began offering a 10 percent promotional discount, even as costs continued to rise.
So far, however, the discount has failed to do much to increase sales. A recession, Mr. Lee said, is “already here in our eyes.”
Many Americans share that pessimistic outlook. After gasoline prices shot up this year, measures of consumer confidence plunged, and they have remained low. Companies have begun preparing for a recession, pulling back spending on advertising and discussing contingency plans with investors.
Still, the economy still has important areas of strength. The job market is strong, and although hiring has slowed somewhat, layoffs remain low in most industries. Many households were able to build up a cash cushion early in the pandemic — a result of reduced spending and increased government aid — which could help them keep spending even if their incomes stagnate.
Those factors give the recovery a bit of a cushion, but they also make the Fed’s job harder by making the economy less responsive to higher interest rates. At the same time, the Fed can do little to control the prices of oil and food, which are influenced by global events such as the war in Ukraine.
“The problem is that there are many forces that are pushing for high inflation right now,” said Carola Frydman, an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Not everything is easy to address with monetary policy.”
The third quarter was in some sense a mirror image of the first quarter, when G.D.P. shrank but consumer spending was strong. In both cases, the swings were driven by international trade. Imports, which don’t count toward domestic production figures, soared early this year as the strong economic recovery led Americans to buy more goods from overseas. Exports slumped as the rest of the world recovered more slowly from the pandemic.
Both trends have begun to reverse as American consumers have shifted more of their spending toward services and away from imported goods, and as foreign demand for American-made goods has recovered. Supply-chain disruptions have added to the volatility, leading to big swings in the data from quarter to quarter.
Few economists expect the strong trade figures from the third quarter to continue, especially because the strong dollar will make American goods less attractive overseas.
Climate change, shifting criteria, and growing complexity in assets are facilitating an evolution in commercial real estate valuation.
By K.C. Conway, CCIM, MAI, CRE | Fall 2022
Not since the passage of Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) in 1989 has the valuation of real estate come under such scrutiny and disruptive change as it has in 2022. For much of the past 30-plus years, commercial real estate valuations were credible, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. But commercial real estate valuation has become more complex due to the introduction of three factors:
A blurring of real estate and business enterprise value.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) constraints along with a new set of proposed appraisal guidelines and credentialing that may replace the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP).
Practical Applications of Real Estate Appraisal (PAREA), which is the probable replacement criteria/methodology to overhaul current USPAP and appraisal guidelines.
More than three decades ago, the motivating force in the appraisal industry was a lack of public trust in appraisals resulting from a deregulated savings and loan industry that led to egregious overvaluations and eventually a collapse in the ability to properly analyze asset value. The savings and loan crisis lasted a decade and led to the creation of the Resolution Trust Corporation and USPAP, which were needed to restore the structure of the real estate valuation industry.
Is your valuation knowledge up to date with these three factors?
Complexity from a blurring of the business value (going concern elements of valuation) to the pure real estate fee-simple property rights of value. Today, this blurring of property and business values extends to all property types and industry sectors, including hotels and hospitality variations (including timeshares and Airbnb/VRBO), self-storage, manufactured housing and for-rent subdivision communities, REITs with NNN-lease structures for big-box retail stores, e-commerce warehouses, and mixed-use adaptive reuse projects.
Brokers, investment advisers, and appraisers are quickly realizing an ESG score may become more impactful on valuation than the selection of a cap rate.
ESG/DEI as a valuation element to address climate risk and diversity impacting every aspect of the CRE industry and today’s economy. ESG is no longer an acronym that operates as a substitute for climate change. And along with DEI, the two concepts are now mainstream policies that influence capital allocation and valuations at the property level for both investment advisers and individual CRE professionals. How so? ESG scoring criteria and capital allocation implications based on these scores are transaction determinants. A less-than-favorable ESG or DEI score can derail a REIT merger or debt/equity capital allocation to a property. Brokers, investment advisers, and appraisers are quickly realizing an ESG score may become more impactful on valuation than the selection of a cap rate.
PAREA providing an alternate pathway for aspiring appraisers to fulfill experience requirements. The Appraiser Qualifications Board (AQB) created PAREA with the objective to “create an alternative to the traditional appraiser supervisor/trainee model for gaining appraisal experience.” PAREA was influenced by a 2020-2021 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development investigation by The Appraisal Foundation, an entity created by the 1989 FIRREA legislation.
The AQB adopted the criteria and guide note for PAREA in 2020, with both going into effect Jan. 1, 2021. PAREA, related to new appraisal credentialing, are guidelines currently under development by the AQB with aim for release and public comment in late 2022.
A sales comparison approach to value that uses cap rates from comparable transactions without adjusting for going concern would be like comparing apples and oranges.
Few commercial real estate property types escaped significant changes in the COVID-19 era. These changes impact not just the use and operation of the physical commercial real property, they impact the understanding of market value by blurring the physical “sticks-and-bricks” fee-simple market value with going concern or business value. The going concern represents the value of the total assets of the business including tangible (the real estate — land, sticks, and bricks), intangible, and financial assets. This blurring of value comes into focus through the graphic in the most recent publication of “The Appraisal of Real Estate, 15th Edition,” by The Appraisal Institute, along with case studies involving timeshares, manufactured homes, and self-storage property types.
Timeshare Industry and Property. The timeshare industry has been moving from the traditional weeks-based system to a points-based system. While the new system allows flexibility for individual owners, it also creates operational and going concern complexity. The weeks-based system gives an owner the right to a unit in a specific resort during a specific week each year. However, in the points-based system, the owner’s rights to a specific resort show as points that can be exchanged for use at a different time during the year or at other resorts in a company’s network. This gives the points-based owner more use options — options that also translate into value. There is increased value in having this flexibility, especially amid COVID-19. Appraisers and brokers should consider precisely how the change from this traditional week-based system to one based on points accrues to the business value of the timeshare property — not the real estate market value. Weeks versus points is a change that blurs the market value of real estate with the going concern of a timeshare property. The physical property may look the same, but the revenue and operational costs of such a change are quite material.
Manufactured Housing. Manufactured housing communities have evolved tremendously since their inception and subsequent 1976 regulation. The early years in this industry sought to address the nation’s housing shortage after World War II. Today, they are positioned to play a key role in addressing today’s ever-increasing shortfall. The dated neighborhoods that were initially the norm, leaving negative connotations aside, are not comparable to the manufactured housing of the last two decades. They are no longer referred to as trailer parks, and these new communities share more with traditional single-family neighborhoods in both layout and home design. They offer amenities such as fitness centers, dog parks, pools, pavilions, pickleball and shuffleboard courts, storage facilities, community centers, gated entrances, and increased management services. Many of these changes are due to the consolidation of ownership, largely from institutional investors or REITs, because larger institutional owners have more resources to improve these assets.
Self-Storage. The self-storage industry is another example of a property type that has undergone considerable change. Like manufactured housing, the influx of institutional capital (REITs) — along with the evolution of design, services, and operations — has made this property type more of a business than an assemblage of storage lockers on a tertiary piece of land with limited highest and best use. The self-storage market of today is far removed from the mom-and-pop-owned sites with design features like single-story elevation, non-climate-controlled units, unappealing steel buildings with drive-up exterior access with limited or no security, and no on-site resident management.
The facilities are now more typically acquired and owned by institutional capital and professionally managed, with facilities featuring climate-controlled units, interior secure access, elevators, and drive-thru access. They also offer more services that accrue to the intangible assets of the going concern or business — services such as extensive security systems, and online lease and bill pay — plus, on-site management that operates a moving store offering supplies and rental trucks for use. In essence, these properties house a going concern that has all the characteristics and operating costs of a hotel. Institutional capital has transformed this property type so much so that self-storage as a CRE asset category experienced the highest value appreciation in 2021 over the past 12 months from before COVID-19, jumping 28 percent, according to Green Street.
The evolution of the self-storage facility is leading to the bifurcation of the classification of these facilities between institutionally owned, Class A properties, and the remaining 70 percent of inventory owned and managed by mom-and-pop entities. Self-storage facilities are generally categorized into Class A, B, or C properties, which correspond to the facility’s age, condition, location, quality, amenities, and level of management. According to the 2020 Self-Storage Almanac, six public companies control 31.2 percent of the nation’s self-storage supply, and the 100 Top Operators (including these six public companies) represent 47.7 percent of the nation’s 2020 self-storage supply.
Class A self-storage facilities attract a particular group of owners who are institutional in nature (REITs) and are investing in both the business enterprise and the going concern versus solely the real estate. As a result, transactions of these type of self-storage facilities represent sale of a going concern and not just the real estate. Such transactions are typically based on a price-earnings multiple. The inferred cap rate applies to the going concern business sale and not the real estate. The real estate (land and building) are just one of the three types of assets contributing to the value of a going concern, and care needs to be taken not to ascribe personal property, intangible assets, or financial assets to the real estate. A sales comparison approach to value that uses cap rates from comparable transactions without adjusting for going concern would be like comparing apples and oranges.
The emphasis on class type for self-storage properties parallels that associated with flagged hotel properties, franchised restaurants, etc., in that all are professionally managed businesses operating within a real estate asset that have elements of going concern.
Pulling It All Together
The complexity of going concern and business enterprise is embedded in more CRE property types than just hotels and restaurants.
When determining the market value of commercial properties, care needs to be taken to ensure that the calculated valuation reflects asset components specific to the real estate itself and not the elevated value of the going concern. The following are some recommended adjustments to separate real estate market value from the going concern. It’s not just a legacy hotel or restaurant with business enterprise value to consider in 2022. The breadth of property types with going concern value has expanded and some adjustments are required, including:
Extract Non-Realty from Sales Transaction Comparables. When determining the real estate market value, non-realty components — such as the cost of moving trucks or fixtures constructed for specific uses — must be adjusted for or extracted from the total transaction sale price.
Market Rent and Occupancy. The objective in a market value determination is to estimate the average market rent and occupancy versus a specific property’s operating rent and occupancy that could be influenced by other factors, like “weeks versus points” pricing in timeshares or inferior or superior amenities and services as in the case of climate- versus non-climate-controlled self-storage.
Management Fees Don’t Capture All the Going Concern. Consider the revenue contribution and expense-side accruing to going concern value from any additional off-site services (advertising, IT and tech support, accounting, security monitoring, etc.) that may be above what is generally seen in the market. A general 3, 5, or even 10 percent overall management fee often doesn’t cover the expenses for the business services not related to the typical 3 to 5 percent property level management for physical maintenance and on-site management.
Distinguish the Going Concern Cap Rate in a Transaction. Selecting a cap rate requires judgment and a breakdown between the asset classes (tangible real estate, intangibles, and financial assets). Of significant note on this point is Chapter 37 in “The Appraisal of Real Estate, 15th Edition.” REIT and portfolio transactions often utilize a purchase price allocation (PPA) to segregate the non-realty, property-by-property market value for the real estate and use these transaction price allocations for SEC and GAAP accounting reporting. Be sure to inquire about the PPA with the buyer so as not to misrepresent a pro rata of the portfolio sale with non-realty attributed to an individual property in the aggregate transaction.
Don’t Overlook the Cost Approach. The cost approach is integral to the principle of substitution and is a reliable method to value just the real estate assets. Note the following from “The Appraisal of Real Estate, 15th Edition”:
In situations where the cost approach can be developed reliably, it can be useful in determining the appropriate allocation of value to the different asset classes. A common strategy is to use the cost approach to value only the tangible asset classes (land, sticks, and bricks). The value indication from the cost approach can then be compared to value indications from the sales comparison and income capitalization approaches to highlight the inclusion of non-realty and intangibles to the going concerns.
ESG/DEI as a Valuation Element to Address Climate Risk and Diversity
As mentioned earlier, ESG and DEI initiatives are now critical CRE factors. ESG scores by proxy advisers such as Glass Lewis and ISS — as well as CRE debt monitoring companies like Trepp — can make or break a transaction. Several top-10 banks with CRE concentrations now incorporate a level of ESG underwriting to the commercial real estate credit approval process. A credit request based on a less-than-favorable ESG score influenced by a single tenant (such as a firearms maker or fossil fuel company) or a property ownership structure that lacks diversity can result in a negative credit approval decision.
Brokers, CRE investment advisers, and appraisers collectively need to understand how ESG scoring is going to impact all aspects of the CRE transaction process.
The nationally recognized CRE debt-monitoring company Trepp has published extensively on ESG scoring and developed its own modeling that translates down to the individual property level. Trepp has also partnered with RMS, a Moody’s Analytics Company, to create a new composite environmental risk score based on the integration of RMS’s climate catastrophe risk models with Trepp’s CMBS and CRE products. This partnership will provide both a physical risk score and a business interpretation to properties listed in Trepp’s database. In the future, the partners plan to bring new scores and metrics focusing on enhanced risk measurement and add more granularity to facilitate analysis.
Brokers, CRE investment advisers, and appraisers collectively need to understand how ESG scoring is going to impact all aspects of the CRE transaction process from underwriting to capital allocation to market value. The ESG score may become more impactful on value than the selection of a cap rate.
Conclusion
From the embedding of going concern and business value within more property types to the evolution of PAREA that could potentially replace the USPAP, a lot is changing in how commercial real estate value is determined. Whether you are a broker, appraiser, or investment adviser, how commercial real estate value is determined is more in focus in 2022 than at any point dating back to 1989 and the passage of the FIRREA legislation.
Don’t get caught off guard. Start getting prepared today for how CRE valuation will be conducted tomorrow.
