Staying power in real estate investing means structuring every deal to survive a down market without a forced sale, a capital call, or a debt maturity crisis. At Arrowpoint Properties, that principle comes directly from Dick Goldberg, a multi-generational North Shore owner-operator who has held properties acquired in 1972 and 1975 through every downturn since and who advises and mentors CEO Lamattina. The operators still standing after 20, 30, and 50 years are not the ones who timed markets perfectly. They are the ones who structured their deals so that time was always on their side.
Key Takeaways
- Staying power is a structural decision, not a mindset. It is produced by specific choices at acquisition: fixed-rate debt with a long term, enough equity cushion to absorb a down market, and a business plan that does not require a sale at a particular time to return capital.
- The COVID cycle proved the principle by eliminating its violators. Sponsors who ran floating-rate bridge debt on thin equity deals found themselves with reset debt costs, stalled renovation programs, and no exit. Many are no longer operating. Arrowpoint had none of those problems.
- Conservative underwriting is not the same as low-return underwriting. It means the model cannot depend on too many things going right at once. One aggressive assumption in the right market is manageable. Three aggressive assumptions in the same deal is not underwriting - it is hoping.
- There are no permanent downturns. Markets have peaks and troughs. The operators who survive troughs intact are positioned to take advantage of the recovery. The ones who get forced out at the bottom miss the entire upside.
- Buying for the long term changes the acquisition calculus. A deal underwritten for a five-year hold with conservative assumptions looks different from a deal underwritten for a two-year flip. The price you can pay, the debt you will accept, and the renovation program you approve all change when the hold period is real rather than aspirational.
Dave Lamattina has been acquiring and operating multifamily in the Merrimack Valley for 22 years and has completed 26 syndications without a loss of investor capital. The philosophy described in this article has been applied across every deal in that period. For the specific underwriting rules that express staying power in practice, see how to underwrite a multifamily deal.
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The Pickup Truck
It was February, sometime around 2002 or 2003. Dave Lamattina had recently met Dick Goldberg, a well-known North Shore real estate family, at a shopping mall food court through a mutual connection. Goldberg invited him to come up to his office the following Friday to talk about real estate and see some properties.
The next Friday, it was a blizzard.
Lamattina got in his two-wheel drive sedan and drove up anyway. Goldberg couldn't believe he showed up. "This kid must be motivated," he said.
They got in Goldberg's pickup truck and drove around the North Shore. Goldberg pointed out properties as they passed them. That one I bought in 1972. That one's been in the family since '75. Property after property, decade after decade, still there, still generating income, still in the family.
That afternoon is the origin of every underwriting decision Arrowpoint has made since.
What Staying Power Actually Means
The phrase gets used loosely. It sounds like persistence, or patience, or some character trait that successful investors possess and unsuccessful ones do not.
Goldberg meant something more specific. You have to be able to outlast downturns, down markets, and everybody else who cannot. The operators who weather the storm are the ones still in the game. The ones who get forced out - by bad debt, by a business plan that required a sale, by too little equity cushion - are the ones who learned the lesson by losing money instead of making it.
Staying power, in practice, is the product of decisions made at acquisition. It is not something you develop after the market turns. By the time the market turns, those decisions are already made. The question is whether you made them right.
What the COVID Cycle Demonstrated
During COVID, new sponsors and groups were jumping into the multifamily market who didn't have much - or any - prior experience. All of a sudden, they were buying deals by the dozen, all over the country. Many of those same operators are no longer doing well.
They got risky. They overpaid for deals. They took on bad debt structures - floating-rate bridge loans on value-add properties with thin equity - with the expectation that conditions would continue to cooperate. They weren't buying for the long term.
When rates reset, their debt costs moved with them. Renovation programs that were supposed to be complete before refinancing were still in progress. The exit window they had modeled closed. Some had to raise emergency capital. Some sold at distress. Some are still working through the consequences.
Arrowpoint was not among them. Fixed-rate debt, adequate equity, a business plan that could survive being held. None of those properties required a sale at the moment the market made sales difficult. The structure held.
The Difference Between Conservative and Timid
Conservative underwriting does not mean refusing to buy anything, or requiring a deal to survive conditions that will never actually occur. It means the business plan cannot depend on too many things going right at the same time.
One aggressive assumption in a deal - a renovation program that needs to hit its rent premiums, or an exit cap that needs to hold at current market levels - is manageable. You make the bet, you execute well, it works. Two aggressive assumptions in the same deal start to multiply the risk. Three is not underwriting.
At current market conditions, Arrowpoint models assume 0-2.5% annual rent growth and cap rate expansion at exit rather than compression. Neither assumption is aggressive. Neither assumes the market cooperates beyond where it sits today. If the market improves, the deal performs better than modeled. If it does not, the deal still works.
The deal that only works if rents jump 5% and the exit cap compresses 50 basis points is not a conservative deal with a good return target. It is a bet that two things have to happen, and it is priced as if they already have.
Buying for the Long Term Changes What You Pay
There is a practical consequence to underwriting for a genuine long-term hold: you cannot pay whatever the market will bear if the price only makes sense at an optimistic exit.
Lamattina walked away from a sizable New Hampshire deal - north of $44 million, which would have been Arrowpoint's largest acquisition at the time - when two problems emerged during diligence. The equity raise was not coming together, partly because of underlying concerns about the location. And a property tax reassessment in that municipality was coming due in a way that the underwriting had not fully absorbed.
The deal looked good on the initial model. It did not look good when the model was stress-tested against the realistic tax scenario. Arrowpoint walked.
That discipline - the ability to walk away from a deal that is not structured to survive adversity - is the flip side of staying power. You can hold through a downturn if you bought right. You cannot hold through a downturn if you paid for perfection.
The Properties That Are Still There
Dick Goldberg's family has owned North Shore multifamily since 1972. That means they held through the New England real estate collapse of the early 1990s, the GFC, COVID, and every smaller cycle in between. The properties that are still there produced income through all of it.
The families who sold along the way - the ones who needed liquidity at the wrong time, or who had overleveraged, or whose business plans required a refinance that the market would not provide - are gone. The capital they built is someone else's.
Jay Goldberg, Dick's son and now Arrowpoint's managing partner, grew up watching this. He came back from Chicago after working in mezzanine finance and joined Arrowpoint around 2009 or 2010, starting as an investor before becoming a full partner. The multigenerational perspective is not a marketing concept at Arrowpoint. It is literally the family background of one of its partners.
How Staying Power Shows Up in Deal Structure
The abstract principle translates into specific, non-negotiable rules at Arrowpoint.
Debt is fixed-rate, non-recourse, at 70-75% LTV with a minimum five-year term. Agency preferred. No bridge loans. No floating rate. The term is long enough that a down market in years two or three does not force a decision. The rate does not reset with conditions. The LTV leaves enough equity cushion that a moderate decline in value does not wipe out the capital stack.
The business plan cannot require a sale to return investor capital on the modeled timeline. Exits are opportunistic. River's Edge was sold at year three because the offer was too good to refuse - the yield maintenance penalty was almost $1.5 million, and the deal still returned 32% net IRR. Appleton Square had offers between $40 million and $42 million and Arrowpoint pulled it from the market because the timing was not right. Both decisions were available because neither deal required a sale.
Renovation programs are approved on a 15-20% year-one return threshold. The spend is sized to what the current rent market will support, not to what it might support if conditions improve. That constraint has become stricter as construction costs have risen, which is part of why Arrowpoint has moved toward newer-vintage assets where the renovation requirement is lighter - not because the threshold changed, but because the deal types that clear it have shifted.
What Investors Are Actually Getting
For an LP considering an Arrowpoint deal, staying power has a specific implication: the structure of the deal is designed to protect their capital first and maximize return second.
That ordering is not incidental. Twenty-two years and 26 syndications without a loss of investor capital is the outcome of a consistent set of structural decisions. No deal was perfect. Some deals faced headwinds - market conditions, regulatory changes, operational surprises. The ones that produced returns for investors were structured to absorb those headwinds without requiring a forced decision.
The investors who have been with Arrowpoint across multiple deals understand this. The ones evaluating for the first time are looking at a 22-year track record that demonstrates it.
The Other Side of the Lesson
Staying power is usually discussed as a defensive concept - how you survive a downturn. The other side of it is equally important.
The operators who survive a downturn intact are the ones positioned to acquire when distressed sellers have to move. They have capital, they have relationships, and they are not distracted by their own portfolio problems. The operators who are working through their own bridge debt maturities during a market dislocation are not in a position to take advantage of it.
Arrowpoint has been in the same market for 22 years. The brokers know the firm. The sellers know the firm. Off-market deals come because the relationships are there and the reputation for closing is established. That positioning is only available to operators who have not burned their capital, their relationships, or their reputation by chasing deals that were not structured to survive.
Dick Goldberg's portfolio is still there because he bought right in 1972 and 1975 and held. The 50 years of income that followed were available to him because the deals were structured to survive whatever came next. Arrowpoint builds every deal with the same assumption: whatever comes next, we need to still be here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the minimum cash-on-cash return Arrowpoint targets in year one?
Arrowpoint targets a minimum 6% cash-on-cash return in year one across both its value-add and core-plus deal types. That floor applies regardless of the overall IRR target for the deal. A deal projecting strong long-term returns but weak current cash flow raises questions about how the business plan is structured and whether it requires events - rent growth, appreciation - that are not yet in evidence.
Why does Arrowpoint use fixed-rate agency debt instead of bridge loans?
Bridge debt is designed for deals where execution needs to happen on a defined timeline before the loan comes due. If the renovation program runs long, if rents do not move as projected, or if the refinance market tightens, a bridge loan creates pressure to act - to sell, to raise equity, to extend at punishing rates. Fixed-rate agency debt removes that pressure. The five-year minimum term means Arrowpoint can hold through a down market without a forced decision. The 2022-23 rate environment demonstrated what happens to bridge-financed deals when the market moves against the plan.
How does Arrowpoint decide how much to spend on a unit renovation?
The renovation budget is set during due diligence and is tested against a 15-20% return threshold before the deal closes. If the projected rent premium at market rents does not produce at least that return on the renovation spend in year one, the budget is adjusted or the deal does not proceed. At current construction costs, that threshold is harder to meet than it was five years ago, which is part of why Arrowpoint has moved toward newer-vintage assets that require a lighter renovation lift.
What rent growth does Arrowpoint assume in its underwriting?
Current underwriting uses 0-2.5% annual rent growth. That reflects current market conditions in the Merrimack Valley, where meaningful rent growth in Class B/C workforce housing is constrained by tenant incomes, and where a Massachusetts statewide rent control initiative is a realistic regulatory risk for the next ballot cycle. Conservative rent growth assumptions force the deal to be underwritten on current income, not on projected income that has not yet materialized.
What happens to an Arrowpoint deal if a capital improvement is more expensive than budgeted?
Budgets are set during due diligence and tested against the 15-20% year-one renovation return threshold before closing. That threshold acts as a constraint on the renovation program - the spend is sized to what the rent market will support, not to an ideal renovation scope. When unexpected capital needs arise - aging mechanical systems, board of health requirements, items that cannot be deferred - the prioritization framework is straightforward: items that affect habitability or legal compliance come first, everything else gets sequenced based on cash flow availability. The 15-20% Rule covers how renovation budgets are structured.
David Lamattina
President & CEO
About Dave Lamattina
Dave Lamattina is the founder and CEO of Arrowpoint Properties, a vertically integrated multifamily owner-operator based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He has been acquiring and operating multifamily assets in the Merrimack Valley for over 22 years, with 1,100+ units acquired and exited and a current portfolio of approximately 850 units valued at around $230 million. Arrowpoint has completed 26 syndications with an average net IRR of 32% and a 2.50x equity multiple.
