09/30/2026
This was the first apartment community I invested in as an LP.
One return question I always ask when looking at a deal is about the equity multiple.
Not because IRR is not useful. It is. But equity multiple answers something more fundamental:
How many times do I get my money back?
A 1.8x equity multiple means that for every dollar invested, the investor receives $1.80 back over the life of the hold.
A 2.0x equity multiple means the capital doubled.
Equity multiple does not account for the timing of cash flows or the length of the hold.
It answers a simpler question: how much capital is expected to come back relative to what was invested?
This becomes important when comparing deals with similar IRRs but different structures.
A 15% IRR on a three-year hold and a 15% IRR on a seven-year hold can look identical in a summary. They are not. The longer hold can return materially more total capital, even though the projected IRR is the same.
I use equity multiple as a sanity check on IRR because it grounds the conversation in something concrete.
IRR helps explain the pace of return.
Equity multiple helps explain the total capital expected back.
Looking at both together gives a clearer picture than either one in isolation.