Plans of Sale – Nov. 17, 2025
Two small-cap apartment REITs plan to wind down operations to maximize shareholder value; a third is reviewing its options
For a trio of small-cap apartment REITs, 2025 has been a year of strategic review. Elme Communities last week completed its previously announced sale of 19 properties to an affiliate of Cortland Partners for $1.6 billion in cash, which will be followed by more such divestitures. Apartment Investment and Management Company (Aimco) announced that its board of directors had completed a strategic review that will see the company sell off its remaining assets. Centerspace has just begun the process of reviewing its options; its board of directors is evaluating the relative merits of conducting a sale, merger and other business combinations, among other scenarios.
“The portfolio sale marks the first step effecting the company’s Plan of Sale and Liquidation” that was first announced in August, Bethesda, MD-based Elme said in a release last week. “The Plan of Sale and Liquidation contemplates the sale or disposition of all of the company’s assets, including the company’s nine remaining multifamily assets and Watergate 600, and the voluntary wind-down and dissolution of the company’s business and affairs.”
Aimco, headquartered in Denver, has reached the same conclusion. Its board has approved a Plan of Sale and Liquidation, subject to shareholder approval. A recent sale of its Boston-area portfolio to Harbor Group International and CBRE Investment Management represented a preliminary step in that direction.
A formal plan of sale “would allow for the acceleration of asset sales, establishes the most tax efficient manner of monetizing the company’s remaining assets, and does not preclude a corporate transaction or the sale of the Aimco platform in the future,” the company said last week.
Minneapolis-based Centerspace has an apartment portfolio heavily concentrated in secondary and tertiary markets. Accordingly, Green Street—which does not actively cover Centerspace—opined last week that “time will tell if the strategic review culminates in a bulk sale to a private buyer (portfolio is likely not a quality fit for larger public REIT peers) or liquidation, but the board deserves credit for actively trying to maximize shareholder value.”
Does this portend a wave of strategic reviews and large-scale divestitures among the larger apartment REITs? Probably not. Each of the three companies that made such announcements last week “lacked scale and/or an operating edge to engender a cost of capital that would allow [them] to succeed in the public market,” according to Green Street.
What apartment REITs have in common across the board, though, is a gap between NAV and share prices, with shares trading at a discount of 15% or greater. Should the discounting persist, Green Street observed, “odds of shareholder activism or privatization will rise, but are likely to remain low in the near term, and betting on corporate events can be a frustrating waiting game due to social issues that can delay or prevent change for extended periods of time.”
Meanwhile, “most management teams’ capital allocation playbooks seem to be missing the pages that show how to optimize value during periods of deep discounts to NAV,” according to Green Street. To their credit, the three small-cap REITs are acting to close “the huge gap between private and public markets.”