Nobody in the U.S. owns more apartment units than Boston Capital. The firm’s founders were among the original forces behind the passage of the federal low-income housing tax credit, and they’ve been helping corporations and individual investors buy housing credits for more than two decades.

Boston Capital resisted the urge to overextend during the market’s go-go years, and as a result, it’s now in the position to do record business: Jeffrey Goldstein, Boston Capital’s COO and director of real estate, said the firm is on track to raise and invest $600 million in affordable housing this year. The company is also targeting $200 million on the market-rate side.

It’s Goldstein’s job to get that money in the door, and then put it to work for Boston Capital’s investors. And, he said, while the investment landscape has shifted dramatically over the past 18 months, the demand side of the equation is only growing: “And as an industry, there’s a need for affordable housing in all 50 states. There’s a lot of unmet demand.”

Jeffrey Goldstein

Title: Chief Operating Officer and Director of Real Estate, Boston Capital; Boston

Age: 49

Experience: 23 years

What has this downturn been like for Boston Capital?

If you go back 18 months, when the economy had come to a grinding halt, we were fully ramped up to do significant business. We were long on a lot of properties, we were preparing to sell a lot to investors. We needed to make a lot of quick business decisions. We made some dramatic cuts to really ride the storm out, and our investors were willing to stick by us. We were able to eke it out, and as the recovery started to take hold in the beginning of 2010, investors started to come back. It’s a classic cliché that in every downturn there’s a flight to quality. The number of our investors has gone up dramatically. In 2010, we will probably raise and invest more equity than in any year in our 35-year history.

Why?

The yields we’re able to produce are very attractive. And there’s a tremendous need for this kind of product. Investors are really flocking to us.

What kind of yields are you looking at?

On the affordable side, before this whole debacle, they got down as low as 5 percent, and when all the equity went away they shot up as high as 11 or 13 percent. Now, they’ve pulled back into the 9 to 10 percent range, after tax. That’s the equivalent of a 13 to 14 percent before-tax yield, and relative to alternative investments, that’s a very attractive yield.

Who are your investors right now? Have they changed since the downturn?

Our investors are broadening, and deepening. There were those who might have been with us and three or four other groups; now, they’re with us and maybe one other one. There are two types of investors on the affordable side. There are banks that need to invest for their Community Reinvestment Act credits. That side has never gone away. The biggest difference is the economic investors who left when yields were at five percent are now back.

On the market- rate side, most investors became very risk-averse. They were hoarding cash, and they’re just starting to loosen up. Multi-family is really being seen as a tremendous opportunity over the next five-to-10 years, largely due to national demographics, and the amount of product that has not been built.

Do you think shifting homeownership patterns are going to help drive demand for rental product?

We’re reverting back to 63 percent or 64 percent home ownership rates, and household size is different, too. These days, it’s OK to be 30 and not own a home yet. People are more comfortable renting. And the industry has really responded to all that in the types of buildings it’s constructing now.

When you see cap rates on market-rate multifamily going down into the low fives, or even the fours, are you surprised? Are those numbers for real?

Honestly, those were surprising to us, too. But they are real numbers. If you think about the core investor who’s looking for a long-term, steady, safe return, if you’re buying at cap rates in the fours in downtown D.C. or New York or Boston, and you’re able to finance the debt at extremely low historical rates, and you’re doing it as a portion of an overall investment plan, I understand where those people are coming from. A lot of it is also being driven by the REITs. They’re able to buy at a 4.5 cap and finance at a 5 or 5.5 percent rate. A lot of these markets you’re seeing those cap rates in have big barriers to entry. We bid on a couple of those high-profile [Washington, D.C.] deals. The price got too rich for our blood, but we do see the value of having some portion of our overall investment pool in that type of product.

Boston Capital’s Top Five Current Massachusetts Investments

• Clark Biscuit Apartments, North Adams
• Capen Court, Somerville
• Rockland Place Apartments, Rockland
• Clarendon Hill Towers, Somerville
• Madison Park IV, Roxbury