Kushner Properties buys $200M in Houston multifamily properties

Sunbelt strategy focuses on high-growth area submarkets

Kushner Properties' Laurent Morali and Nicole Kushner Meyer 
Kushner Properties' Laurent Morali and Nicole Kushner Meyer

Kushner Properties’ Sunbelt holdings just keep expanding.

The company closed on three multifamily properties in Houston Wednesday, paying a total of $200 million for the portfolio, according to a person familiar with the deal. Located in the high-growth North Houston submarkets of Tomball, Cypress and Lake Houston, the apartment complexes are all new-construction assets.

A national builder broke ground on the properties in 2020, and leasing on all three finished this year. The number of units purchased total 1,072—all one- and three-bedroom apartments averaging 1,034 square feet in size—and average rents run just over $1,500 per month. The complexes are all Class A workforce housing with associated amenities expected of high-end multifamily properties, the person said.

The deals were brokered by Berkadia, and Freddie Mac is the lender on all three. The portfolio marks the company’s entrance into the Houston market, said Riley Wilson, who heads Sunbelt acquisitions for Kushner. Wilson wrote in an email that the portfolio of high-quality assets in “well thought-out locations … provides a unique opportunity to acquire scale in strong submarkets that will benefit greatly from the ever-growing city of Houston.”

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The acquisitions are part of a recent Sunbelt expansion strategy by Kushner, which bought a total of 8,000 multifamily units across the southern United States in 2021. The company also sold around 6,000 units this year, most of them in older complexes built in the 1970s and located in the eastern U.S. The more recently purchased properties were built after 2010.

The multifamily market in the Sunbelt appeals to Kushner, among many other companies making similar expansions, due to strong fundamentals in areas such as population and job growth. In addition to its two-year expansion into the region, the company recently established a presence in Florida, Texas and Georgia.

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