Thursday, July 30, 2009

More on Fractured Condos

Fractured condos are condo projects where only a portion of the project is sold to individual owners, and the remaining units are rented to tenants. A couple of recent examples:

The Millworks at Novato (from the Marin Independent Journal):

Millworks, a 420,882-square-foot residential/commercial project at De Long and Reichert avenues, had a grand opening in May but has only sold two of 124 condominiums situated above a Whole Foods grocery store slated to open next spring.

"Because of the mortgage market, it's really hard to get condo loans right now," said Mike Ghielmetti, president of Pleasanton developer Signature Properties. "A lot of the folks who are interested in buying there have homes to sell, and it's just a slow market. This is what we have to do for an interim period to make this viable."

Unit financing is a huge issue – Fannie and Freddie won’t buy unit mortgages until the project is at least 50% sold out, so these days the only available financing for unit purchases tends to be the construction lender on the project. It seems likely the construction lender on this deal refused to do that (construction lenders are not keen on holding long term fixed rate mortgages in portfolio). I suspect the other problem with this project is it’s pretty big for the size and niche it fills – how many people are there who want to live in downtown Novato?

Siena in Corona Hills (from GlobeSt.com):

 

A buyer from Fontana has acquired 189 units of a broken 296-unit condominium conversion project from its lenders for $14.25 million in a deal that says much about the state of the multifamily market in the Inland Empire today, according to Paul Runkle of the Inland Empire office of Hendricks & Partners in Temecula, who brokered the sale. The property is the Siena in Corona Hills at 2125 Highpointe Dr., formerly an apartment complex known as the Crossing…"This comp says that a quality, broken condo deal that was leased up with rentals, that was not readily financable, and was widely exposed, eventually sold at at 8.93% cap on an all-cash basis," Runkle says.

There are enough numbers in the story to piece together the before and after on this deal:

image

The moral to the story on this one is, don’t buy an apartment project on a 3.55% cap rate.

See previous post “Are Fractured Condos a Good Investment Opportunity” for a discussion of some of the hazards of doing these deals.