The 234 Apartment

Multifamily sales totaled $147 million in the Buffalo area market in 2016, up from $127 in 2015 and again above the $ 100 million dollar level achieved each of the last five years.  The investment market is most active in suburban garden apartment complexes . Private locally based principals were active as both buyers and sellers with prices at all-time high per unit valuations . These older apartment properties comprise the majority of the existing inventory and are often fully occupied with rising rents. From a tenant perspective they are often the best housing available at a given price. Located in dense residential neighborhoods , they are near employment, shopping, entertainment and within desirable suburban school districts . It would be impossible to duplicate them today in the same locations with the same rent structure and consequently they have little competition in their price range. This drives the rent growth that attracts investors. In April of 2017, RENTCafe’s surve...

When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City in 2014, he made no secret of his intent to place affordable housing at the center of his term. Not long after his election, he rolled out his Housing New York plan–a 10-year strategy to build or preserve around 200,000 affordable units across the city’s five boroughs. advertisement Affordable, when it comes to housing in New York, is a slippery term. Critics of de Blasio’s plan have pointed out that the majority of the units built or converted under Housing New York remain out of reach of low-income New Yorkers–those earning less than $43,000 per year. And while the plan has succeeded making a nearly 100,000 unit dent in the city’s 550,000 affordable-unit shortfall, the terms of the new unit’s affordability are ephemeral: The majority of the units created and preserved under the mayor’s plan are only regulated temporarily, often for as little as two decades. There is no guarantee that a unit designated as affordable today will remain...