In the last few years, competition for multifamily deals has encouraged investors to pursue deals off-market. For buyers, the aim has been to curb competition, not necessarily to buy at a reduced price. For sellers, on the other hand, off-market deals come with a bad reputation that they automatically equate to a lower price tag. Thomas Foley, co-founder and CEO of Archer, says that it definitely not the case.

"Off-market deals likely have that stigma of lower prices from when the industry was much less institutionalized," Foley tells GlobeSt.com. "In general, we've seen that most of the off-market sellers, particularly in the institutional space, sell because they are given 'an offer they can't refuse', which gets them well into their target returns much earlier than expected."

In general, deals that trade off-market are comparable to those that go through the full marketing process. "There is unfortunately no alternative universe where we can observe the counterfactual, but we can see the pricing comparing those deals to similar marketed deals and in many cases, find that the off-market deals tended to transact at or even sometimes above the market trending price," says Foley, adding that this has been especially true at his firm. "In particular, with Archer's clients, every off-market deal that we've assisted acquisitions teams has been above or at the top of the market price point."