Apartment buyers are turning to off-market transactions more frequently as a way to find opportunities and curb competition. According to Thomas Foley, co-founder and CEO of Archer, two out of three private multifamily transactions are done off market, while about half of sub-institutional deals and a third of institutional deals are off-market.

"The biggest surprise for us was just how common off-market transactions were at any size," Foley tells GlobeSt.com. "We additionally saw off-market deals increase again once deals got above $100 million—mostly because of the quickly shrinking set of mega-buyers that can take those deals down."

While off-market deals are happening across the pricing spectrum, they are more common in smaller transaction sizes. "I think there are several reasons why off-market tend to happen more frequently with smaller deals on the balance," says Foley. "The smaller the deal, the higher the relative costs to sell (smaller deals often have larger percent of fees), there are more deals than available brokers, and private investors often have single key decision makers, making it easy to make disposition decisions."