First Draft Live Ep 13: Debt Meets The Housing Crunch (with Sharon Karaffa)

It’s a high-pressure year for multifamily. Looming maturities, tough capital markets, changing policies, a major shake-up of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the horizon and intensified national attention are all converging to complicate the sector.

But multifamily fundamentals are strong, Sharon Karaffa, president of multifamily debt and structured finance at Newmark, said on this week’s episode.

“Absorption has been very high and vacancies are very low. Most of the supply wave is behind us,” she said. “So we think we’re on the upswing.”

The ending of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could disrupt the market, depending on how exactly it happens.

Karaffa said it is critical that the privatized organizations have a line to the Treasury to maintain affordability, that a strict regulatory framework is put in place to avoid the mess of the Global Financial Crisis and that the agencies are not combined — the market needs both to keep competition alive.