Adam talks to us today about where the single-family rental market is today and how it might change over the next 10 years.
Currently, a very small percentage of SFR’s are owned by an institution but over the next 10 years, this number could go up with consolidation.
Adam: Hi. My name’s Adam Stern. I’m president of OwnAmerica. I’ll be the host of your REI Classroom for today. OwnAmerica of course, is the world’s leading SFR platform for trading single family rental property portfolios. What I wanted to talk about with you today is the trillion dollar consolidation that’s going on in the SFR marketplace.
Adam: I wanted to kind of paint the picture of where the SFR marketplace stands today and what I see happening over the next 10 years because to understand where the single family rental market stands in relation to the other core commercial real estate asset classes is a pretty important thing. Amherst came out with a white paper not too long ago that outlined a lot of great things in the SFR space, one of which was how single family rental properties as a marketplace stacks up to the other core commercial asset classes.
What it showed was SFR is bigger than every one of them save for multifamily. All of the assets combined in the single family rental market, that is all of the homes that are owned and operated as rentals by investors, equals $3.1 trillion today compared to the multifamily $3.5 trillion and the other 4 asset classes, in commercial, office, retail, industrial, hospitality, all in the $2.2 trillion to just over the $1 trillion mark, which shows that SFR is a massive, massive market when compared to the other commercial asset classes.
The interesting thing they showed was that the institutional ownership of these other asset classes dwarfs that of SFR. You take multifamily for example. Fifty-five percent of multifamily properties in the United States are owned by institutions when compared to institutional ownership of SFRs which is only 1%. That’s a huge disparity.
If you think about the trend that’s happening right now and will continue to happen for the next 10 years, if you think about the trajectory of institutional ownership being less than 1% right now or about 1%, if it raised to let’s say 35%, which would still be less than multifamily by a fair margin, that would equate to $1 trillion of assets being acquired by large institutions and brought from large portfolio owners to institutional ownership and medium-sized owners to institutional ownership. And, there is a massive amount of money that is going to be made by people I suspect very much like the ones that are listening to this podcast and that are members of FlipNerd.
We actually do portfolio sales, so we look at things in terms of acquisition fees. If you think about that just in terms of the amount of money that can be made in this consolidation just by doing sales of properties, if you earn 2% on . . . if the average of 2% was earned on this consolidation, that’s $20 million in acquisition fees that can be earned by people that create buying opportunities for these institutions to consolidate.
The thing we’re seeing right now is the professionalism and the operational capacity of these larger funds that are either rivaling or actually are right now better than the operational capacity of a lot of the large scale multifamily owners in the United States. We just had a deal that got underwritten at a 70% NOI, that’s 30% expense load because an owner in a market had such a large portfolio that their expense ratio got pushed down so far that we were able to underwrite it at a 70% NOI.
That kind of thing where the scale and the operational efficiencies of these large portfolio owners gets to a point where their acquisition opportunities become larger and larger and larger. You can see how a trend toward consolidation can be sped along by portfolios getting larger, operational capacity getting better, NOI margins getting larger, and expense margins getting shrunk down.
We think this is going to be a continued trend and we believe that everyone on a continuum of large investors all the way to the very smallest investor has a role to play. That’s a subject I’ll talk more about in the following webcasts. For now, I appreciate you listening.