Chicago Multifamily Property Blog

Average of the top competitive rates from eXp Commercial’s National Capital Markets Partner CommLoan from a database of 700+ commercial lenders as of 7/24/23

A number of market participants agree that multifamily sales activity is on the upswing despite the current low transaction numbers.

Running a commercial real estate asset on a day-to-day basis can be expensive. As such, it is important for operators to manage costs relative to rental income to ensure that the given property is profitable. From a management standpoint, costs can be grouped into two buckets: Operating Expenses (or “OpEx”) and Capital Expenses (or “CapEx”). While they are both categories of expenses, there are material differences between capital expenses and operating expenses.

Real estate investors have done well. Rents have risen and home price appreciation has been quite exceptional. In the past three years, the typical rental rate and typical home price have soared by 16.4% and 35.5%, respectively. Over the past five years, those figures are 24.9% and 50.8%. These returns were occurring at a time of low-cost financing.

Commercial real estate can be broken down into several different categories. At a high level, when people think of different types of commercial real estate, they typically think about shopping centers, office buildings, or warehouses. But the commercial real estate industry is much more precise when it comes to defining property types. Below is a list of different types of commercial real estate with a description of how each category is typically defined.

Valuing commercial property is an important step in every commercial real estate transaction. This post will demystify the commercial property valuation process and walk you through some common valuation techniques used in the commercial real estate industry.