BRT Apartments Corp. enters its May 8 earnings release with a notable shift in short positioning — and a stock that has quietly recovered 10% over the past month, even as the fundamental debate around Sunbelt multifamily remains unsettled.
The most striking move this week is the sharp pullback in short interest. Estimated short positions fell roughly 32% over the past seven days, dropping from around 283,000 shares to just under 192,000 — bringing SI as a percentage of the free float down to less than 1%. That is a meaningful reversal. Through most of April, shorts had been building steadily, peaking near 299,000 shares around April 9, before unwinding almost as quickly as they accumulated. The current level is the lightest short positioning seen in the past six weeks.
The borrow market reflects the same loosening. Cost to borrow has collapsed — down nearly 90% over the past month, now running at just 0.81% annually. That compares to a brief spike to 7.8% in late March and another jump to around 1.5% in mid-April, both of which have since fully faded. Availability is ample. With a lending-pool utilisation well below 15% and a 52-week high near 27%, the borrow market is nowhere close to stressed. Options add a mild wrinkle: the put/call ratio has moved above its 20-day average, sitting at 0.17 versus a mean closer to 0.12 — about 1.6 standard deviations elevated — though it remains well below the 52-week high of 0.53 set when sentiment was far more defensive. Overall, positioning looks cautious rather than crowded on the short side, with a modest pick-up in options hedging heading into the earnings date.
The Street's view on BRT is constructive but has been gradually downgraded in terms of price targets over the past year. The most recent action — from Citizens in November 2025 — kept the stock at Market Outperform while cutting the target from $24 to $20. B. Riley had similarly maintained Buy but trimmed its target in stages, most recently to $19.50. The consensus mean target of around $18.33 implies roughly 26% upside from the current $14.58 close, a gap that reflects either deep value or a persistently sceptical tape. The bull case rests on a valuation discount versus suburban Class B peers and upcoming refinancing activity. The bear case centres on lower FFO and AFFO estimates for 2026 and continued uncertainty around Sunbelt operating fundamentals — tenant demand, delinquency risk, and rent pressure in BRT's core markets. EV/EBITDA has crept up slightly over the past month to just above 18x, while the stock trades at a price-to-book below 0.72x, a persistent feature of this name.
Ownership concentration is the defining structural feature of BRT. Gould Investors, L.P. controls more than 21% of shares outstanding, and members of the Gould family collectively account for a further ~8% in personal holdings. Insider activity data (most recently through late December 2025) showed Gould Investors executing a cluster of purchases in October 2025 at prices between $14.72 and $15.00 — buying roughly 34,000 shares in total at those levels. The CFO, George Zweier, sold a small block of 6,801 shares in late December at $14.74. The net 90-day insider position through the close of that data window was positive: approximately 40,754 shares bought on a net basis. With the stock now back near those same mid-$14 October purchase prices, the insider accumulation zone is directly in play.
Historical earnings reactions for BRT have been consistent in one direction: the stock has declined on the day following each of the last four prints, with one-day moves ranging from -1.3% to -2.9%. Five-day reactions have been uniformly negative as well, averaging a drop of roughly 4-5% over the week following results. The next release on May 8 arrives against a backdrop where the stock has already rallied 10% over the past month — meaning the entry point for shorts who wanted to fade the print has become less attractive, which may partly explain the sharp short covering this week.
What to watch on May 8: whether same-store NOI and occupancy trends in the Sunbelt markets provide any evidence that the rent and delinquency pressures flagged in the bear case are stabilising, and whether management updates its refinancing timeline — $178.5 million in maturities through 2027 is the number the Street is tracking most closely.
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