Coming into 2025, industry professionals expected the multifamily sales market to take off. While the year still may produce better numbers than 2024, things didn’t exactly go according to plan.
“For the last two or three years, we've said every year, ‘This past year has been slow, and next year, we’re seeing all the signs where we're going to have a big year,” Jon Siegel, co-founder and chief investment officer at Bethesda, Maryland-based apartment owner RailField Partners, told Multifamily Dive. “The turnaround that was going to happen in one year is just taking several years to happen.”
Some obstacles to deals, such as the gap between buyer and seller pricing expectations and interest rate uncertainty, have been persistent issues for a couple of years now. But in 2025, market volatility became another roadblock.
“At some point, the market is going to shake loose,” Matt Ruesch, co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based investment firm Broad Creek Capital. “I think a lot of people were expecting that to happen in 2025, but there's been a lot of volatility in the market too.”
Andrew Kadish, CEO and chief investment officer of Bethesda, Maryland-based CAPREIT, thinks Trump administration policies, such as tariffs, have added to market uncertainty for investors.
“Whether it's in real estate or in equities, we want stability,” Kadish told Multifamily Dive. “No one wants to underwrite an exit cap that they can't truly trust. And I think that has been a major issue for a lot of the investment houses, whether institutional or really golf course guys.”
While this volatility won’t disappear in 2026, multifamily dealmakers remain hopeful that sales volume will take off in the year ahead. “We feel like 2026 is going to be a really active year, and you also see a lot of other funds and investors that have a lot of cash ready to deploy,” Ruesch said.
Here are five multifamily sales trends to watch this year.
Buyers and sellers come together
When interest rates began rising in 2022, gaps emerged in perceptions of property values. Sellers clung to pre-rate-hike prices, while buyers pointed to a higher cost of capital that was dinging values.
According to Kadish, those issues persist. “Sellers definitely need to warm up to the fact that it is a new world,” Kadish said. “They can’t rely upon their 2021 or 2022 pro forma. They are going to get, frankly, a higher exit cap than they were expecting, and they were originally underwriting three to five years ago.”
However, Ruesch said the market is starting to thaw out, as buyers and sellers get a handle on where interest rates are headed.
“People are getting more comfortable with the current environment, and there seems to be some consensus on the general path of rates,” Ruesch said.
In addition, Ruesch expects properties to be available at attractive prices in 2026.
“You're starting to see buyers that are getting out there,” Ruesch said. “We're starting to see more sellers that are ready to transact. So you can feel that the market is beginning to get a little more interesting, and I think it's going to be a really interesting 2026.”
Los Angeles-based Stockdale Capital Partners acquired two properties over 30 days in the fall. Managing Director Chase Jensen said he sees more deals coming across the market next year.
“I believe that the transaction volume is getting to the point where now you see a lot of price discovery, where sellers and buyers are closer and closer to making deals happen,” Jensen said.
Distress rises
For a couple of years now, apartment investors have been amassing war chests as they wait for distressed multifamily properties to hit the market.
“I think that's what everyone was hoping for a year to 18 months or 24 months ago,” Kadish said. “They thought we would see a lot of pending maturities. All these groups, six months into COVID, bought a ton of stuff at very high pricing.”
So far, however, that hasn’t materialized. “We’ve had a lot of pretend-and-extend,” Kadish said. “I think a lot of lenders are very, very hesitant to take properties back and would rather just put it off for another 12 months.”
But that doesn’t mean problems don’t exist. “There are a lot of deals out there that have a significant leverage problem,” Jensen said
However, banks will have to stop extending. “Eventually, you know, those loans are going to need to be addressed,” Jensen said. “What that looks like remains to be seen.”
Camden Property Trust CEO Ric Campo thinks a pivot could happen in mid-2026, when lenders lose patience with borrowers and stop extending credit. “That’s going to put pressure on sellers to sell,” he said on the REIT’s third-quarter earnings call in November.
But will that mean wholesale distress hitting the market? Most apartment executives think that’s extremely unlikely. Some merchant developers and value-add owners may need to sell, but not at rock-bottom prices.
“We might see a little bit, but that wave of distress that we're all kind of hoping for, we're not seeing,” Kadish said. “I don't foresee that.”
Rent stabilization draws investors
On Camden’s Q3 call, Campo also pointed out that sales volume has varied by region this year.
“There's definitely been more sales on the coasts than there have been in the Sun Belt,” Campo said. “The reason being that, clearly, coastal revenues, you can predict in terms of positive growth easier than you can the Sun Belt, given the supply issues that we've been facing there. When underwriting future growth is more difficult today, it's just because of what's going on in the marketplace.”
However, as supply burns off, executives are optimistic that the rental market could stabilize in 2026. For instance, Ryan Davis, CEO of Dallas-based consulting firm Witten Advisors, told Multifamily Dive that he expects rent growth will return to its normal level in the high-2% range by the end of 2026. Others agree.
“There are fewer new properties,” RailField Partners’ Siegel said. “We are starting to see rents in most markets stabilize, even starting to turn positive. In some markets, we're seeing occupancy start to turn positive. So things are slowly happening.”
On Camden’s earnings call, Campo thinks that the available units for rent will be more constrained as supply burns off. That, in turn, should bring buyers off the sidelines.
“It should be easier for people to look out into ‘27 and ‘28 and see a very robust rental growth scenario, given the supply dynamics that we have today,” he said.
But economic issues could upend the rental recovery, potentially thwarting a sales recovery. If people are losing their jobs, both property fundamentals and sales will suffer.
“I think there's a world where we could really start to see a lot more activity and a lot more growth, and positive vibes around the industry next year,” Siegel said. “But there's also a world where we don't because the real world intrudes on that and nobody has any money to spend, people are losing their jobs or something else weird happens.”
Equity stays ready
There’s no shortage of money available for apartments. Debt funds, banks, life companies and the government-sponsored enterprises are all active. And the Federal Housing Finance Agency in November increased the lending caps to $88 billion each for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowing them to purchase up to $176 billion in multifamily loans in 2026.
“On the lending side, there's a lot of debt out there,” Ruesch said. “So that's not the issue.”
While debt is plentiful, the amount of equity interest is up for debate. Campo said there’s a “ton of debt and equity capital available” on Camden’s Q3 earnings call. “There's really good bid depth and not really strong liquidity in the market.”
Other REIT executives noted similar trends. “There's plenty of private capital out there in general, and it's fairly liquid and pretty aggressive on pricing,” Bob Garechana, chief investment officer for Equity Residential, said on the REIT’s third-quarter earnings call in October.
Robert Jue, CEO of apartment and industrial property owner Standard Real Estate Investments, told Multifamily Dive he has seen capital flow from different sectors into multifamily since the tariff announcements in 2025
That should continue in 2026. “It’s tangential, but there was a lot of money that was going into industrial that, post tariffs, turned off on industrial and has been flowing into multifamily,” Jue said.
However, some smaller sponsors are facing challenges with investors, which limits the number of buyers in the market, executives tell Multifamily Dive.
“But, if you're out there deploying in a market like this, then I think you can actually get some of the best deals that are out there because there are not a lot of buyers,” he said.
The REITs sell or sit on the sidelines
Right now, the capital looking for apartments is coming from private sources. For smaller REITs, this situation has led to an examination of their business strategies going forward. The board of directors for Aimco, once a dominant name in the apartment industry that owns 2,524 units, has decided to liquidate the company following a strategic review.
Elme Communities took the first step to unwinding the company by selling a 19-asset portfolio to Cortland Partners for $1.6 billion in cash in August. The Bethesda, Maryland-based REIT will market its nine remaining assets for sale. The firm’s shareholders still need to approve the plan.
In a November press release, Centerspace confirmed that its board of trustees initiated a review of the REIT’s strategic alternatives. The Minneapolis-based REIT, which owns more than 12,000 units, said there is no assurance the review will result in a transaction or other strategic change.
While it would be a surprise to see any of the larger REITs on the sales block, the disconnect between public and private values is keeping them on the sidelines, as many of the firms focus on buying back their stock.
“With private market assets often trading at sub-5% cap rates and at or above replacement cost, our stock presents a compelling value at current levels, making us selective and limited in our acquisition activity for the time being,” EQR CEO Mark Parrell said on the REIT’s Q3 call in October.
Instead, the larger REITs will need to see pricing change before they jump back into the market in a meaningful way.
“Based on our current cost of capital, you generally won’t see us buy much at current pricing,” Brad Hill, CEO of MAA, said on the firm’s third-quarter earnings call in October. “So, the pricing that we would have to be able to achieve on an acquisition would have to be substantially different from than it was just a few months ago.”
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