Dive Brief:
- Parkview Financial REIT has foreclosed upon a new 102-unit residential property at 1919 Market St. in West Oakland, California, after a loan failure, SiliconValley.com reported on Jan. 15.
- The outlet reported that an affiliate of the property’s developer, oWow, lost the asset through foreclosure. At that time, the unpaid debt was $58.5 million. Parkview Financial spent $37.5 million to take control of the property in early January. Multifamily Dive reached out to Parkview for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
- California’s Bay Area has been a trouble spot for apartment loans since the pandemic. Parkview Financial provided a $32 million loan to construct the property in 2019. The lender filed a deed in lieu of foreclosure in June 2025, and the proposed foreclosure sale occurred in December 2025.
Dive Insight:
As people left the metro area for more space and cost savings in the suburbs and smaller cities, landlords suffered.
“People didn’t have to live in the urban core and report to an office,” Vanessa Siebern, chief operating officer at Folsom, California-based FPI Management, told Multifamily Dive in 2022. “So they were moving to areas that offered lower rent and a better quality of life.”
As a result, some high-profile apartment companies struggled. Veritas defaulted on loans for multiple properties, while the loan backing Parkmerced, the largest residential community in San Francisco, went into servicing.
Oakland has also seen its share of issues amid heavy supply. Rents have plummeted as 10,000 units of housing were delivered in just a few years, making it challenging for developers to refinance construction loans, according to CoStar.
In 2024, UDR assumed the ownership interest of a 173-unit lease-up Residences at Lake Merritt in Oakland, built by developer Mill Creek Residential after the Atlanta-based developer told the REIT it would not fund its share of a capital call.
In the Residences at Lake Merritt submarket, two to three months of concessions and rent declines of 30% compared to before the pandemic were the norm, according to former UDR President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Fisher
However, rents in the city began to turn the corner in 2025, according to CoStar. San Francisco is heating up even more. With 4.3% year-over-year rent growth last year, the metro ranked No. 7 in ApartmentList’s top 2025 markets, with a surge in artificial intelligence investment and workers returning to offices driving growth.
“A lot of these startups, and I agree with them because we were a startup at one point, need to be in the same room,” Greg MacDonald, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based apartment owner and manager Ballast, told Multifamily Dive. “It's really hard to build anything great virtually. And I think a lot of these tech companies have learned you have to be in the office.”
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