Foreclosure Auction Slated For Sandy Springs Apartment Complex

The lender on a suburban Atlanta apartment complex is looking to force a foreclosure auction after the owner has been unable to pay off its loan.

Orec Structured Finance Co. is foreclosing on a $47.5M loan for Grace Apartment Homes Sandy Springs, a 250-unit, garden-style complex off Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, according to a public notice filed with Fulton County.

MSC Properties purchased the property, previously called Celebration at Sandy Springs, in 2021 for $58M from an LLC registered to Illinois-based Oak Realty Group, according to the Reonomy property database. 

Orec provided MSC with a $47.5M conventional loan that was set to mature in January. The 10-building property at 7000 Roswell Road is scheduled for a foreclosure auction on Sept. 5 on the Fulton County courthouse steps.

But MSC partner Macky Pannu said his firm may be on the verge of saving it from being sold.

"The property will not be foreclosed as we're working with our lender to come to an agreement and are pretty close," Pannu told Bisnow in an email Wednesday.

MSC Properties owns two other complexes in Metro Atlanta, according to its website. 

So far, distressed sales or foreclosures in Metro Atlanta’s apartment market have been rare.

But as interest rates ticked up over the past year, late-cycle investors — especially those with floating-rate debt or loans maturing in the next year — could find themselves with assets difficult to refinance, said Ladson Haddow, managing partner with Haddow & Co. Real Estate Consultants. That could push apartment values down and trigger more distress.

"Ultimately it comes down to if you have to sell or not. If you don't have to sell, you're not going to right now,” Haddow said. “But if you're forced to sell because you have debt coming due, that's what’s likely to trigger these lower values."

For the past five years, investors flocked to Atlanta, buying up properties with cheap debt before flipping them for high prices as the area’s rents and occupancies surged, Haddow said. The ability to quickly sell a complex has dried up as banks shied away from drafting new loans as they wrestle with portfolios teeming with commercial real estate loans.

"It's kind of like hot potato. Who's going to be left holding the bag when the music stops?" he said. "I think there's going to be more of these. There's going to be some value resets."

While metro Atlanta landlords continued to push up rents this year, a slowing job market, especially in the tech sector, plus a record number of new units coming online this year has pushed the region's vacancy rate to 7.2% in the second quarter, the highest in a decade, according to Marcus & Millichap.

Developers were underway with more than 42,000 units as of the second quarter, a third of which are set to deliver this year. The increased supply has hampered developers' ability to raise rents; rents grew 3.2% year-over-year in the second quarter, according to Marcus & Millichap, after increasing by more than 20% in 2021.

Despite the rising interest rate environment, United Brokers America President Maria King said she hasn't seen distressed selling at this point in the Southeast. Private capital and out-of-state investors continue to scout for apartment buys in Metro Atlanta, especially in the suburbs where political blowback is restraining the supply of apartments — including in Sandy Springs.

“I’ve been waiting to see if [a wave of distress] is going to happen,” King said. “But there are still people trying to test the market, and you still have some buyers out there.”

Distress is mounting across the Sun Belt, however. Roughly $8B in multifamily loans are maturing in the second half of 2023, according to Morningstar Credit.  Trepp Senior Managing Director Manus Clancy told Bisnow this month the “epicenter of concern” are those who bought value-add properties with floating-rate debt at the peak of the market in 2021 and the first half of 2022.