If you have been thinking about selling your apartment building in Los Angeles, you have probably already figured out that finding a broker is not the hard part. There are hundreds of them. The hard part is figuring out which one is actually going to serve your interests instead of just their own.
This post is going to give you a straight answer to that question.
What Most Owners Do First
Most apartment owners start the process the same way. They get a cold call from a broker who claims to have a buyer. Or they Google around, find a few names, and call whoever shows up first. Or someone in their network gives them a referral without knowing much about how that broker actually works.
None of those approaches are necessarily wrong. But none of them are going to tell you what you actually need to know before you hand someone the keys to the most important financial decision of your life.
What to Actually Look For
The broker you choose to sell your apartment building in Los Angeles should be able to answer yes to all of the following without hesitating.
Do they specialize in multifamily? Residential agents sell houses. Commercial generalists sell everything. Neither of them knows the multifamily market the way a dedicated multifamily advisor does. You want someone who spends every day thinking about apartment buildings, cap rates, rent trends, and buyer behavior in this specific asset class. Anything less than that is a compromise.
Do they know your market specifically? Los Angeles is not one market. It is dozens of submarkets that each behave differently. What a building trades for in one part of the city can look completely different from what a similar building trades for somewhere else. The person selling your building should know the comparable sales, the active buyers, and the current demand in your specific area. If they are giving you broad city-level numbers without drilling into your submarket, they do not know it well enough.
Are they going to tell you the truth even when it costs them? This is the one most people forget to ask. A broker who needs a listing is going to tell you what you want to hear about your building's value in order for you to agree to sell. A real advisor is going to tell you what your building is actually worth, what the realistic buyer pool looks like, and whether now is actually the right time to sell. Those two conversations can look very different. The one that feels better in the moment is not always the one that gets you the best outcome.
Do they have a real buyer network? Anyone can list a building on LoopNet and wait for offers. A broker with a real buyer network is actively working relationships with investors who are ready to move. That network is what gets your property in front of the right people before it hits the open market, and it is what creates competition among buyers when it does.
What We Do Differently
At Jack McCann Multifamily Advisors, we do not start the conversation by asking you to sign a listing agreement. We start it by running your building through the McCann Multifamily Stress Test, a free live session where we evaluate your property across the numbers that actually matter and give you an honest read on where it stands.
Sometimes that session confirms that selling now is the right move. When it does, we take you through the full process. Pricing strategy, offering memorandum, buyer outreach through our network, negotiation, and everything through close.
Sometimes it tells us that selling right now would leave money on the table and that there are two or three things you could do in the next six to twelve months to significantly improve your position before going to market. When that is the case, we tell you that instead. Because that is what an advisor does. So that's where we start, now here's our answers to those questions:
Do we specialize in multifamily? Yes, multifamily property is all we’ve ever specialized in and the only thing that we spend our time focusing on every single day. Our brokerage, Lyon Stahl Investment Real Estate, similarly only focuses specifically on Los Angeles multifamily real estate.
Do we know your market specifically? Yes, we track every listing, expiration, escrow, and sale of multifamily property across all of Southern California. We’ve also done business across nearly every submarket throughout Los Angeles over the decade we’ve been in the business. Over those years we’ve proven our ability to use that extensive database and our existing multifamily expertise to hone in on a specific submarket at any given time, provide owners with a proper valuation, and get their deal sold in the shortest amount of time for the largest amount of money.
Are we going to tell you the truth even when it costs us a commission? This is genuinely the foundation of our company. We will always tell you the truth about what the best next steps are with your building whether or not that leads to a commission for us. Our business model is centered around providing real value to the people we work with and in turn earning their trust, receiving positive testimonials, warm referrals, and potentially their business in the future.
Do we have a real buyer network? Yes, and we built a proprietary tool around it. The McCann Multifamily Matchmaker actively matches your listing to the buyers in our network whose criteria it fits before your property ever hits the open market. That means when it does go live, we are not starting from zero. We already know who the most likely buyers are and we are already in contact with them. That is what creates real competition, and real competition is what gets you the best price.
The Honest Answer to the Question
Who should you sell your apartment building with in Los Angeles?
Someone who knows multifamily specifically. Someone who knows your submarket. Someone who is going to tell you the truth about your building whether or not it gets them a listing. And someone who has the tools, the network, and the process to get you the best possible outcome when the time is right.
If you want to find out what that looks like for your specific building, reach out. We will start with a free Stress Test and go from there.
