Positioning Before the Turn
By Garrett Williams, MSF · Founder & Managing Partner, PTP Partners — August 6, 2026
The national picture: still soft, but the edges are turning
July gave multifamily its best monthly rent increase since 2015, outside the pandemic years. Rents rose $4 to $1,771 nationally. Year-over-year growth is still weak at 0.2%, but that’s up from flat.
The bigger story is where the strength is showing up. Markets that got hit hardest by the supply wave, Orlando, Nashville, Charlotte, Tampa, posted some of the strongest monthly gains in the country. Charlotte rents rose 0.6% for the month, even as the metro still carries the highest completions-to-stock ratio in the country at 5.9%.
That’s the tension right now. Supply is still elevated. But demand is absorbing it faster than the headlines suggest. The 10-year Treasury is at an 18-month high, inflation is still above target, and none of that is going away soon. But for operators who bought right in Sun Belt secondary markets, the worst of the pricing pressure may be starting to ease.
Big capital is placing its bet on North Carolina
That’s the backdrop for the buyers who are already positioning in North Carolina.
Tishman Speyer just bought Berkshire Dilworth, a 296-unit property in Charlotte’s Midtown-Dilworth submarket, for an undisclosed price. It’s their seventh acquisition through the TS Plus fund, which has raised $973 million. Earlier this year, the same fund bought a 244-unit property in Raleigh.
Read that twice. A firm with nearly $1 billion in dedicated capital just added its second North Carolina asset in eight months, in a market that’s still working through some of the heaviest new supply in the country.
Tishman isn’t buying because Charlotte is easy right now. They’re buying because Charlotte’s demographics haven’t changed, and submarkets like South End and Dilworth are already seeing leasing velocity pick back up as concessions shrink. Big, patient capital doesn’t wait for the all-clear signal. It moves when the fundamentals are still good but the sentiment hasn’t caught up yet.
That’s exactly the setup workforce housing investors in Sunbelt secondary markets have been watching for.
The Fed: steady, but not settled
I’ll be honest, I expected a hike this time. Inflation’s still above target, oil prices are volatile because of the conflict in Iran, and the setup looked like enough to push the Fed’s hand. Instead, they held the benchmark rate at 3.5%-3.75%.
But the vote itself tells you the surprise doesn’t mean the pressure is gone. It was 9-3, with three regional Fed presidents dissenting in favor of a hike. That’s a hawkish lean hiding behind a quiet headline.
New Chair Kevin Warsh called it a “good family fight” and said he wants that kind of open disagreement. He’s also pulling back on forward guidance, saying he wants markets reacting directly to data instead of to the Fed’s messaging.
For us, that means less hand-holding from the Fed on where rates go next. Borrowing costs staying elevated for longer isn’t the base case, but it’s a real one, and this vote is a reminder not to get comfortable.
The takeaway across all three of these is that capital willing to underwrite through uncertainty in the right markets is still finding deals worth doing. The macro noise hasn’t stopped that.
Thanks for reading Edition 8 of The Basis. If this added value, forward it to someone who should be reading it.
— Garrett
The Basis is a biweekly newsletter covering multifamily market data, underwriting frameworks, and investment strategy.