Christine Espenshade
Christine Espenshade
Vice Chairman; Investment Sales of Multifamily Capital Markets at Newmark
Christine Espenshade has spent most of her 25-year career in commercial real estate selling, and that experience paid off big in 2021.
The Newmark vice chairman handled one of the largest deals in the Washington, D.C., area last year: the sale of four sites, including the 331-unit Aubrey building in Rosslyn, Va., to multifamily real estate investment firm Cortland. The sale was part of Atlanta-based Cortland’s $1 billion investment in the D.C. region. Espenshade has two more deals in the works for Cortland’s master-planned community in Rosslyn, dubbed The Highlands.
The deal helped Espenshade’s team double its transaction volume from $950 million in 2020 to $1.85 billion in 2021, she said. With a superheated multifamily market in the extremely supply-constrained D.C. area, Espenshade predicted that she’d double that number again next year, despite the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. “It’s still a great time to be in this business,” Espenshade said. “Interest rates are a concern, but I think so far the increases have been very measured and are something [businesses] have been able to price in and absorb.”
While concerns over a recession mount, that’s not necessarily bad news for Espenshade’s business. Multifamily apartments tend to do well during a recession as potential homeowners are less likely to buy and more likely to stick to renting, she said.
Espenshade, whose team almost exclusively represents sellers of large multifamily assets, also handled Grosvenor Americas’ sale of a 648-unit multifamily building in Gaithersburg, Md., to Starwood Capital for $204 million and Ares Management and LCOR’s sale of the 324-unit Heather Ridge Apartments in Bowie, Md., for $92 million to Greystar.
Compared to the slow pace of deals and the difficulties of hosting tours during the first year of the pandemic, 2021 has been a whirlwind of activity, Espenshade said.
