Do you underwrite portfolio premium or portfolio discount on a 14-park roll-up exit?
Modeling exit on an aggregation and I can't get the room's consensus and my own math to agree.
The consensus is portfolio premium. A buyer paying $90M for 14 stabilized parks with in-house management, standardized leases, submetering already installed and a single closing, pays up relative to buying the same 14 parks one at a time from 14 old men. Fewer closings, one diligence process, an operating platform included, and the buyer pool at that size includes institutional capital that literally cannot deploy in $4M increments. Call it 50 to 100 basis points of cap rate compression against individual park sales in the same markets.
My math keeps producing the other answer, at least for some portfolios. If the 14 parks sit in nine states, the buyer isn't getting a platform, they're getting a management problem with a promote attached, and the diligence is 14 separate utility systems, 14 sets of local ordinances and nine states' worth of tenancy law, which is a real cost that gets priced. The buyer pool that can write $90M also underwrites like an institution, which means they discount the weakest parks in the bundle instead of averaging them. I've seen a bundle where the three worst parks dragged the whole thing, because the buyer wouldn't carve them out and wouldn't pay portfolio pricing with them in.
So the premium looks conditional on geographic density and quality uniformity, and plenty of roll-ups have neither. Which way do you underwrite it when you don't know the buyer yet?
How do you underwrite exit pricing on a multi-park roll-up?
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