USC: SoCal Apartment Rents Will Rise 2% To 4% In Coming Years

The volume of distressed loans tied to property in Los Angeles grew 15% to $4.7B in the third quarter compared to the quarter before and is likely to grow further as the office market stumbles in 2024. Potential distress, which “is indicative of financial stress that, if not reconciled, has the…

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Throwing investment cash at the multifamily sector was sound logic in the early days of the pandemic: People might not be going out to shop, eat or work from an office, but they would always need a place to live.

Add in the appeal of low interest rates, and it's little wonder investors turned up in droves, taking out floating-rate loans for what had been easy, passive investments or pooling resources with others in syndications promising hefty returns without the headache of becoming hands-on landlords.

But when interest rates skyrocketed, growing exponentially faster than rental rates, distress seeped into the market. Now, a wave of defaults and foreclosures has begun — and is unlikely to end anytime soon.

That has some more experienced investors seeing fields of green and making moves to harvest it when the time is ripe.

“There's no shortage of capital that's wanting to invest in distressed commercial real estate assets,” said  Greg Friedman, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based investment firm  Peachtree Group, pointing to more than $250B of  private equity capital set aside to invest in commercial real estate. Fifty…

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Getting a development financed is one of the biggest challenges in real estate, and when it comes to affordable housing, it is basically impossible without some form of subsidy. That is according to Asland Capital Partners CEO James Simmons, who said capital stacks are becoming more complex and companies are…

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The owners of Griffin Towers, a two-building office project in Santa Ana that sold in April, have signed a lease at the property. Optima Tax Relief signed a 40-month lease of approximately 38K SF and will move in later this year. “The property is well-located, and we’re excited for Optima…

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This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities that keep CRE interesting.

Aref Lahham and his partners have done plenty of big deals in 25 years of running their own opportunity fund, but few as high-profile as landing HSBC in one of the biggest London office leasing deals since before the pandemic. 

London-based Orion Capital Managers — run by founding partners Lebanon-born Lahham, Van Stults and Bruce Bossom — is one of the most successful midsized opportunity fund managers in Europe, with its last fund raising €1.5B. 

In June, it agreed to lease the entirety of its 556K SF Panorama office development near St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London to HSBC, which decided to leave its 1M SF HQ in the Canary Wharf district. The deal marked the biggest office relocation in the capital for years and came in a moribund leasing market. HSBC is paying around £87 per SF, one of the highest rents ever paid in London for such a large amount of space.

Lahham told Bisnow how making the deal to buy the site involved providing a better view of the 300-year-old cathedral and talked through other innovative deals Orion is doing to find value in a market where rising rates are wiping out equity. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bisnow: How did you get into real estate? Lahham: I studied to be a structural engineer, and I have a master's in engineering, in high-rise design. My professional world was designing high-rise buildings in New York and making them stand up with a very famous guy called…

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