Buy and Hold Multi-Family Sales

If you’re a buy and hold multi-family investor, there’s a particular skill set and experience level you should look for when determining WHICH agent to bring on to sell (likely) the most important asset in your life. 

First, I would try to understand HOW their experience matches up with the product that YOU are trying to sell (in this case, small multi-families). The vast majority of agents fall into one of 3 buckets:

Bucket 1: Residential  agent. This is by far the largest bucket. Most residential real estate agents are NOT specialists in multi-family homes. There are all kinds of nuances around multi-family homes - i.e. leases/tenancy at will, rental pricing, multi-family market conditions, zoning considerations for redevelopment - just to name a few. Residential agents tend to know a lot about condos and single families, but they tend not to have the niche expertise around multi-family properties.

Bucket 2: Rental agents. This is a much smaller bucket, but sometimes I see multi-family owners sell their properties with rental agents. A pure rental agent knows nothing about most buy/sell transactions, whether a multi-family or a condo or a single, so generally they do not have the skill set you need for selling your property.

Bucket 3: Commercial agents. Commercial agents are generally focused on either A) non-residential assets like industrial, warehouse, retail, etc OR B) large residential buildings with dozens of units. They typically specialize in a totally different product type with little to no understanding of residential leases for what I call small multi-families (2-12 units). They  have little to no understanding of the rental market, including market rents for your property (which have an outsized impact on true market sale value and tenant quality), rental market trends (which also impact sale value, depending on whether it’s trending up or down). 

Now, you might be asking yourself, well if there are issues with all 3 of these buckets of agents, how do I find the right agent for me? I will keep my shameless plug brief, but the short of it is I actually have a very weird, unique skill-set in this area. I average somewhere between 50-100 rentals a year, about 80-90% of which are typically in Cambridge, Somerville or Medford. I do this in combination with dozens of buy/sell transactions per year. 

My focus, passion and interest is all things investment. In fact, over the last 5 plus years, there has not been a week where I wasn’t working at least a handful of rentals at a time and a handful of buy/sell transactions at a time. 

So at this point in my career I have seen literally 1,000+ apartments and homes. I have rented north of 400 apartments and I have sold dozens of properties of all types. I’ve done this all through an investment perspective. In fact, the largest chunk of my sales are becoming more and more geared towards multi-family properties, between 2 and 12 units. 

So when I look at a property I can give you the insights as both a rental agent and as an investment agent. And my investment speciality is these smaller 2-12 units. I am NOT a commercial agent and while I do have great experience in residential sales, my passion and where I spend the most of my time is with my investment hat on. 

Regardless of what you decide to do, I hope you will take a thoughtful approach when thinking about selling your multi-family to ensure you are picking someone with the right skill set for your property type.