BAM Capital's Ivan Barratt calls this the best apartment buying opportunity in 16 years

BAM Capital founder and CEO Ivan Barratt calls this the best buying opportunity he has seen in the 16 years since he started the Carmel, Indiana multifamily investment firm. He makes the case in a column published Oct. 9 by Multifamily Dive.

His argument rests on two datasets. CBRE found renters absorbed 167,500 apartments in the second quarter, more than double the 77,700 units delivered, and national vacancy fell to 4.3%, below its long-run average. Trepp found the share of delinquent CMBS apartment loans climbed to 7.69% in July, up more than a point from two years earlier.

Barratt's supply case starts with RealPage figures showing deliveries of about 340,000 units over the past year, down from nearly 590,000 at the late-2024 peak. It was the first time in three years completions fell below the decade average, with construction starts at their lowest level since 2011. Developers' deals stopped penciling at today's costs and rates, he writes, and that protects the buildings already standing.

Demand has been parked rather than lost, in his reading. CBRE puts the monthly cost of owning a home at a 105% premium to renting, and half of outstanding mortgages carry a rate below 4%, so owners are not selling and would-be buyers cannot buy. National rents are up only about 1% year over year, which he treats as the reason prices are still cheap rather than proof the sector is broken.

Barratt locates the opportunity in the capital structure rather than the buildings, and the Mortgage Bankers Association counts roughly 13% of multifamily loans maturing this year. Between 2021 and 2022, he writes, many properties were bought with floating-rate bridge debt underwritten at 4% money and 6% rent growth; owners who cannot refinance without writing a large check are showing up as delinquencies, receiverships and foreclosure notices. He adds that the same 2021-22 buyer cannot raise a new fund, leaving the buyer pool for institutional-quality multifamily the smallest in a decade — a claim he states without a cited source.