Just before Manhattan rents started soaring at the start of the year, Blackstone Group agreed to buy a Frank Gehry-designed apartment tower in the Financial District for $930 million.

Today’s big multifamily buys, however, look different from the high-juice deals of yesterday. Instead of buying older properties with heavy rent-stabilized components and banking on the fix-and-flip model, private equity appears focused on free-market buildings with cash flow.

Blackstone’s purchase of the roughly 900-unit Gehry tower at 8 Spruce Street is the city’s biggest multifamily deal so far this year, and it helped push the market close to a record high.

Manhattan multifamily sales totaled $4.4 billion in the first half of the year, the last time it hit that mark was in the second half of 2015 — the peak of the post-Great Recession recovery.

New York is also, relatively speaking, a bargain for investors.

Cap rates for New York multifamily properties are now 5.2 percent, much higher than the national average of 3 percent for the best locations, which essentially means other markets have become overheated and New York has become a less expensive alternative.

Investors who pulled money out of the city in recent years in favor of high-growth areas like the Sun Belt are now moving in reverse: selling out of secondary markets and buying in the Big Apple.

(source: therealdeal.com, picture: Ricardo Gomez)