Picerne Real Estate Group is still going strong after 91 years.
The Altamonte Springs, Fla.–based firm, founded in 1925, is run by the third generation of the Picerne family. It has served many sectors of the real estate industry, starting as a mortgage brokerage; building single-family homes, retail, and office space; and then evolving into multifamily and affordable housing.
As of Jan. 1, the firm owned 64 affordable housing developments with almost 10,000 units. It added two new LIHTC developments with 156 units to its portfolio last year—Liberty Trail Townhomes in Liberty Hill, Texas, and Laurel Court Senior Apartments in DeLand, Fla., on which it partnered with the DeLand Housing Authority to build.
According to Ed Wernecke, senior vice president, Picerne will continue to be focused on Florida and Texas, looking to do three new LIHTC and two to three conventional deals a year. The company recently closed on two developments that received allocations of 9% tax credits last year—one in Altamonte Springs and the other in Daytona Beach.
However, the firm will also be looking to the projects in its portfolio that are nearing the end of their 15-year compliance periods, with the goal of rehabbing the majority of them.
“As we start to get developments coming off of the 15-year compliance period, we’ll look at those and see what we can resyndicate, get a new issuance of tax credits, do a rehab, and own them for the next 15 years,” says Wernecke.
This spring, Picerne is completing its first in-place rehab of 258 units in Martinsburg, W.Va. Because it’s the first one the company has done, an outside general contractor was brought in to help the firm learn the process of in-place rehab work.
