How To Invest In Apartment Buildings: What We Learned Buying 128 Units

People ask us how to invest in apartment buildings more than almost anything else. The honest answer depends on whether you want to be the one finding, financing, and running the deal — or whether you want to invest alongside someone who already does. I talked through both sides of that on the podcast using our own Moorhead, MN deal — 128 units — as the example. Here's the written version.

Route One: Buying It Yourself

Financing an apartment building of any real size — 50, 100, 128 units — almost always means commercial lending, not a residential mortgage. That means a lender underwriting the property's income, not just your personal credit, plus a down payment well into six or seven figures depending on the deal. You're also personally responsible for sourcing the deal, underwriting it accurately, managing renovations, and running leasing and maintenance once it's stabilized — either yourself or through a property manager you're now responsible for overseeing.

It's absolutely doable. It's also, in practice, a part-time job on top of whatever you already do for a living — which is exactly the trade a lot of our investors made once, decided they didn't want to make again, and now invest with us passively instead.

Route Two: Investing Passively In One

The other path — the one most of our investors take — is contributing capital to a deal someone else is sourcing, underwriting, and operating, in exchange for a share of the cash flow and profit. That's real estate syndication (we cover the mechanics in more detail on Why Real Estate). You still own a real stake in a real apartment building. You just don't carry the operational weight of getting it there.

What The Moorhead Deal Actually Looked Like

128 units is a big enough property to support on-site, professional management — which is part of why we like that scale. We underwrote it against the same criteria we use on every deal: below-market rents with a real path upward, deferred maintenance we knew how to price and fix, and a clear multi-year exit plan before we ever made an offer. You can see the full criteria checklist on Our Criteria, and the real unit counts across our whole portfolio, Moorhead included, on Our Portfolio.