Gebroe-Hammer Associates Tops Competitors with 5,645 Units Sold for $775+M in Q1 & Q2

August 6, 2018
Ken Uranowitz, President

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Carin McDonald

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Gebroe-Hammer Associates

2 West Northfield Road
Livingston, NJ 07039

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Firm’s Clients are a Balance of Institutional Investors and Private Individuals

Gebroe-Hammer Associates Tops Competitors with 5,645 Units Sold for $775+M in Q1 & Q2

Livingston, N.J., August 6, 2018 – Multi-family investment brokerage firm Gebroe-Hammer Associates of Livingston, N.J., is outpacing its competitive set on a regional and national level with a reported $775+M in sales encompassing 5,645 units for Q1 and Q2 2018, according to Ken Uranowitz, president. The firm serves a diverse client base of private individuals, private equity firms and institutional investors focusing on suburban and urban high-rise and garden-apartment properties.

“These latest milestones have shored up Gebroe-Hammer’s posture within the multi-family investment brokerage space as the firm of choice among private AND institutional investors locally, regionally and nationally,” said Uranowitz. “A good percentage of our client base remains balanced between institutional investors and private individuals – many of whom have been associated with our firm since its inception 43 years ago and form the backbone of multi-family ownership in the region.”

While initially concentrating on and dominating the multi-family property space in New Jersey, Gebroe-Hammer has evolved during the past 43 years to establish a major presence in the northeastern Pennsylvania and New York State submarkets as well as represent client interests nationally. In addition, Gebroe-Hammer markets mixed-use and free-standing office and retail properties.

“The first six months have been extremely robust in terms of deal totals and units sold, with demand for every asset class – from Class-A to value-add B/C product – hitting all-time high levels,” said Uranowitz. “Apartment buildings, regardless of vintage or tenant demographic, are the frontrunner on investor lists. They cover the full spectrum of neighborhoods from transit-rich cities that are all the rage among millennials to commuter-friendly suburban-bedroom communities.”

Gebroe-Hammer’s notable sales highlights during Q1 and Q2 mirror these trends. In early June, the firm finalized a groundbreaking $328M portfolio sale of 118 buildings/2,137 units spanning New Jersey’s Gateway Region of Hudson County. Exclusively representing a single seller, over the course of 18 months Gebroe-Hammer arranged six separate deals of the urban low- and mid-rise properties poised for repositioning.

Other key New Jersey trades have involved several prominent properties throughout the state. These include the $56M sale of Thousand Oaks Village, a 304-unit garden community in Atlantic Highlands; $50M sale of 452 multi-family units at Forest Hill Terrace Apartments, a critical-mass garden-apartment community in Newark’s tree-lined North Ward; and $30M sale of Donaldson Park Apartments in Highland Park. New price-per-unit benchmarks also were set in East Orange ($257,000+/742 Park Ave.) and Cranford/Union County ($337,500/The Hamlet).

“Our success is directly tied to every broker we have deeply entrenched in individual territories,” said Uranowitz. “Because of their unrivaled knowledge of market values and current active investors, they are able to achieve maximum value for owners. Despite upticks in interest rates cap rates have not decompressed remarkably while demand continues to be voracious for multi-family product.”

The Greater Philadelphia/Northeast Pennsylvania metro has been another hotbed of activity for Gebroe-Hammer’s market specialists. In the suburban municipality of Lindenwold, N.J., an emerging out-commuter enclave of Philadelphia, the firm arranged the $32.1M sale of Woodland Village, a 546-unit garden-style community. To the north in Lehigh County, Gebroe-Hammer also closed the $26.1M sale of Lehigh Crossing, a 211-unit apartment and townhome community.

Of course, Gebroe-Hammer entered the year with tremendous momentum, closing out 2017 with 106 deals involving more than 10,616 units, including four that exceeded $100M. And in the South Jersey/Philadelphia Metro, the firm’s market specialists recorded one-third of the metro’s overall transactions during the final quarter to close out last year.