Chilean investment funds accelerate multifamily building exits amid rental yield collapse

Something has shifted in Chile's multifamily market. For six years, apartment buildings designed for rental income had become one of the most stable corners of the country's real estate sector—a place where money could sit and collect steady returns. But by mid-2026, that stability was cracking. Investment funds that had poured capital into these buildings were now racing to get out, selling not the structures themselves but the individual units inside them, one apartment at a time.

The arithmetic had stopped working. When these funds first invested, interest rates were low and the outlook seemed clear: buy a completed building, rent the apartments, collect the difference. By the end of 2025, according to Colliers data, Chile had 183 multifamily buildings containing 44,020 apartments. The sector had proven resilient through earlier market turmoil. But inflation had done what market crashes could not. Real rents—measured in UF, the inflation-adjusted currency—had fallen between 10 and 20 percent. At the same time, a new property tax surcharge appeared on the books, a cost nobody had anticipated when the deals were structured. Financing costs had climbed roughly 200 basis points. The buildings that were supposed to generate steady income were now generating less of it, year after year.

Thomas Verbeken, who manages investments and assets for Grupo Euro, described the situation plainly: inflation had prevented rental returns from growing, leaving sellers with little liquidity and few good options. Many had decided to exit by selling units individually rather than waiting for a buyer willing to purchase an entire building. At least three major investment vehicles had begun this process. BCI Eurocorp II, backed by Grupo Euro, BCI Corredora de Bolsa, the insurance company Confuturo, and the Angelini family, managed four buildings across Ñuñoa, Estación Central, and Quinta Normal—1,506 apartments in total. The fund had been launched in 2024 explicitly designed to acquire completed residential buildings and sell them off unit by unit. Its internal rules gave it five years to operate, but sources close to the fund said the sales process had accelerated because of the deteriorating returns.

The LarrainVial-Ingevec residential rental development fund, backed by the developer LarrainVial, its brokerage arm, and Inversiones Trentino (connected to the Angelini family), owned seven buildings across La Florida, Ñuñoa, and Santiago. Two of them had begun unit sales about three months before this reporting, and more than half the apartments in those buildings had already sold. A third fund, Rentas Residencial LarrainVial-Eurocorp, with backing from Euro Rentas (Grupo Euro's development arm), LarrainVial, and the insurance company 4 Life (tied to the Del Río family), was following the same path.

Why this strategy was working came down to a gap in what different buyers would accept. Institutional investors—pension funds, large asset managers—typically demanded a cap rate, or annual return on purchase price, around 6 percent. Individual buyers, purchasing a single apartment to live in or rent out themselves, were willing to accept 4.5 percent. That difference meant the buildings could be worth more broken into pieces than sold whole. Esteban Acevedo, corporate finance manager at GPS Property, explained that current valuations on many of these buildings had fallen below what developers or previous owners had paid for them. Selling units individually allowed fund managers to recover their capital even if the building as a whole was worth less.

Institutional investors had also largely stepped back from buying complete buildings, draining liquidity from the market for large-scale transactions. Without that institutional demand, the only way forward for many funds was the retail route—selling to individual buyers, one apartment at a time. And the market was receiving these sales well. Multifamily apartments carried management standards, maintenance protocols, and amenities that often exceeded what traditional residential projects offered, making them attractive to individual purchasers. The buildings were being dismantled and redistributed, their unified purpose as income-generating assets dissolving into a thousand separate ownership decisions. What had been structured as a stable, long-term investment vehicle was becoming a liquidation event, accelerated by forces no one had fully anticipated when the deals were made.