Apartment Complexes- What the Big Wigs Are Saying

REDNews just stuffed our collective belly at the O’Connor apartment forecast lunch and heard some pretty insightful tidbits while we were at it.

The lunch was at Houston’s Courtyard on St. James. The speakers were Ken Lawrence of LMI Capital and Geoff Simpson of The M. Kaplan Companies. Apparently a lot of people were interested in what they had to say, because this was one of the more widely attended forecast luncheons REDNews has seen in a while.

Lawrence said he recently completed a deal where he had to go through 30-35 lenders to find three or four worth working with. Even then, it was only at a loan to value ratio of 75%.

Simpson said he believes the market is bottoming (yay!). He said there is $168 billion out there just waiting. When it comes to purchasing, Simpson says buyers should be looking at a property’s cash flow potential and not thinking of it as a commodity.

If only there were 168 billion in doughnuts just waiting for REDNews. When is the next forecast luncheon?