After the housing bubble burst in 2008, foreclosed homes, shuttered windows and overleveraged for-sale properties became familiar scenery across the country. Despite its generally robust constitution, even New York City’s multifamily market—one of the city’s biggest sectors—suffered a blow just like suburbia.

Before the crash, hungry developers ravenously bought up land in areas like Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens to build shiny new condominiums, expecting to pre-sell enough units to obtain construction financing. But as credit tightened, many of these ambitious projects never filled up—and stopped altogether, leaving behind concrete and metal shells.

But now, those outer-borough locales are beginning to stabilize as new investors pour capital into stalled or foreclosed multifamily properties. “There’s absolutely demand for stalled sites, but it’s a little different,” Spencer Garfield, managing director at Hudson Realty Capital, a real estate fund manager with more than $1.5 billion in assets, tells Real Estate Forum. “There’s a certain risk associated with taking on someone else’s stalled development, and not everybody has the stomach for that risk.”

In terms of debt capital available, he adds, there are sources willing to lend for ground-up development, but they won’t lend for a half-finished building. “Similarly, there are developers that build ground-up but don’t want to take on somebody’s partially completed building,” says Garfield. “So the universe of people willing to buy and lend on partially built buildings is much smaller than the universe of people buying ground-up or building a stable property.”

The investment trend is the result of a citywide phenomenon. According to “Arrested Development: Breathing New Life Into Stalled Construction Sites,” released by Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer in late 2011, construction spending across all five boroughs fell 23% in 2010 from peak years, with the number of construction jobs dropping 15%, resulting in hundreds of stalled projects. As of July 31, 2011, the New York City Department of Buildings reported 646 stalled construction sites across the five boroughs, down from the peak of 709 halted sites in November 2010…

…For the rest of the story, visit the July/August issue of Real Estate Forum.

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