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."