Berkadia Acquires Apartment Brokerage Practice

Berkadia has acquired the apartment brokerage practice of Moran & Co.

With the acquisition, Berkadia will expand its core capabilities to include an enhanced focus on institutional investment sales. As part of this transformation, it will launch Berkadia Institutional Solutions, powered by Moran.

This platform will be dedicated to serving institutional investors nationally through Berkadia’s suite of services and resources combined with Moran’s institutional investor relationships.

Moran’s track record in multifamily investment sales, with a specialized focus on institutional investors, should complement Berkadia’s existing investment sales, mortgage banking and servicing platforms.

CEO Justin Wheeler tells GlobeSt.com that the transaction provides the company with the ability to develop deeper client relationships.

“We can do everything that they [clients] need to do for capital markets and their multifamily assets,” Wheeler says.

Moran Co-Chairman Mary Ann King will be joining Berkadia as co-head of Investment Sales and head of Berkadia Institutional Solutions, powered by Moran. She will work with Keith Misner, SVP and now co-head of Investments Sales, to lead the integration of the entire 31-member Moran team, including 15 dedicated institutional sales advisors, into Berkadia.

Moran’s collaborative culture made it a fit with Berkadia.

“From a cultural perspective, finding that fit into Berkadia was searching for unicorns and rainbows a little bit,” Wheeler says. “We have a very collaborative culture in an industry that is characterized by people who are more lone wolf individual producers.”

While COVID and the resulting economic fallout make this an unsettled time for a significant deal, Wheeler is bullish on the multifamily sector’s growth prospects moving forward. Specifically, he thinks the incoming Biden administration will view apartments as the way to solve the housing crisis.

And, regardless of the timing, acquiring the apartment brokerage practice of Moran & Company was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. “You just have to take advantage of the opportunities when they come your way,” Wheeler says.

In the past few years, the commercial real estate industry has raised $83 billion in 2019 and $23 billion through June 2020, according to Preqin. Since housing is an essential asset type, multifamily has been a strong performer, generating attractive risk-adjusted returns over the past 25 years, according to the NCREIF Property Index (NPI).

Those kinds of returns, combined with the asset class’s relative safety, has drawn big money from around the world.

“Multifamily became an allocable, investable asset,” Wheeler says. “Whether it’s sovereign funds or big private equity groups, they started to see it as a place where they could actually allocate money much like they do in stocks or bonds.”