DJR Investment Group

09/05/2026

A real apartment trade closed in West Palm Beach and the numbers are public, so it is worth walking through.

Cortland sold an 812-unit portfolio to Fairfield for 208 million dollars. That comes out to 256,200 dollars per unit. The debt was Freddie Mac, arranged through Walker and Dunlop.

If you only remember one number from a deal like this, make it the price per unit. The headline price tells you how big the transaction was. Price per unit is what lets you compare it to something else and actually learn from it.

This is not one of ours. Just a clean public example.

Cortland sold an 812-unit West Palm Beach multifamily complex for $208 million, as the market shows signs of balancing out.

08/31/2026

Rent can be up and cash flow can still be down at the same time. That sounds like a dodge until you look at where the money actually goes.

Rent growth moves the top line. NOI is what is left after expenses. If one big expense category grows faster than revenue does, NOI falls even though the rent roll improved.

Insurance is the category doing that right now. The National Apartment Association has it going from 1.95% of revenue to 4.78%.

So when you see a rent-growth headline, it is worth remembering that it is a top-line number. It does not tell you what the business kept.

08/30/2026

A New York apartment portfolio was appraised at 716.9 million dollars in 2021. Last month the number came back at 447.2 million.

The building did not change. The assumptions underneath the loan did.

When that loan was written, expenses were modeled off 2021 costs. Insurance, payroll, taxes and maintenance have all climbed since then. The rent assumption moved too, but nowhere near as far. Four years of that gap compounding is most of the 38 percent.

It is a useful reminder for anyone looking at apartment deals right now. Stress the expense side harder than the revenue side. You can see where rent tops out. Expenses surprise you later.

Not a deal we are in. A clear public example worth reading.

While the Big Apple saw changes to multiple commercial mortgage-backed securities loans for apartment communities in August, properties in Memphis, Tennessee, and Cincinnati entered servicing.

07/21/2026

Unpopular take: most multifamily investors are optimists with a spreadsheet.

They tour the property, fall in love with the location, then reverse-engineer the numbers until the deal works. That's confirmation bias with a cap rate attached.

I run every deal to 2 numbers before I ever get attached: market value (what it's actually worth) and max bid (the most I'll pay and still hit my returns). If the asking price is above both, no story changes it.

The property doesn't care how much you like it.

07/16/2026

Every deal on my desk gets killed or kept by 2 numbers.

Market Value: what it's realistically worth today.
Max Bid: the most I'll pay and still hit the return I promised.

The gap between those 2 numbers is where most people get emotional and overpay. I don't play in that gap.

Boring? Maybe. But boring discipline is why the capital keeps coming back.

07/14/2026

The fastest way to lose money in multifamily isn't a bad market. It's trusting the seller's pro forma.

I underwrite the rents that exist today, not the ones a slide deck promises. If a deal only works on the upside, it doesn't work. The upside is the bonus, never the thesis.

Pro forma is the seller's dream. Your job is to buy reality.

07/09/2026

Nobody loses money in multifamily at the closing table. They lose it 48 hours earlier, in the underwriting they rushed.

The boring line items are the deal: insurance, taxes after the reassessment, deferred maintenance, the real vacancy. Anyone can model rent growth. The operators who last are the ones who model the costs everyone else rounds down.

If you're underwriting your first few deals, spend your time on the expenses, not the dream.

What line item has burned you the most?

07/07/2026

I spent 40+ hours underwriting a deal last month. Then I walked away from it.

The skill in this business isn't finding deals. It's killing the ones you've already fallen in love with. The deal you don't do is often the best one you make all year.

I've watched operators talk themselves into a property because they'd already mentally spent the cash flow. 2 years later they're explaining to investors why distributions got paused.

What's the hardest no you've ever had to give yourself?

07/02/2026

Unpopular take: most multifamily investors are optimists with a spreadsheet.

They tour the property first. They fall in love with the location. Then they reverse-engineer the numbers until the deal works.

That's not underwriting. That's confirmation bias with a cap rate attached.

I run every deal to 2 numbers before I ever get attached: what it's actually worth (market value), and the most I'll pay and still hit my returns (max bid). If the asking price is above both, no story changes it.

The property doesn't care how much you like it.

Do you agree, or is there more to it?

06/30/2026

For every deal worth buying, I kill dozens on the spreadsheet first.

That's not me being slow. That's the math of multifamily that nobody puts on a highlight reel. I'll underwrite 30+ properties to find the handful worth a real offer. Most die fast: at the T-12, on sellers chasing a 2019 price in a 2026 market, on the insurance quote that comes back too high.

If you're new and it feels like everyone else is closing but you, they're not. They're not posting the 29 they passed on.

Volume in. Discipline out. That's the whole game.