Negative cashflow apartment building. What to offer???

[Karen Higgins]

We all know that it is hard to find a great multi-family deal in today's market. It's better to "make one". We have bought multiple small apartments 10-20 units, that have had upside potential with room to increase the NOI with increased rents and improvement management, with great success... but they all had a positive cashflow at the time of purchase. The building we are currently looking at is a little different and I'd love some input on what you guys would do.

 We are looking at a 39 unit apartment building in a tertiary market of Minneapolis.  The building itself looks great, it was built in the 1990's and and the city it is located in has had continued population growth over the past 10 years and is next to a  larger city with job growth.  

I was so excited about this opportunity until I received the 2019 financials.... Negative cashflow and 20% vacancy. Here is the question, how do you determine a fair price to offer? If I evaluate the cap rate at the current NOI and listing price it is 2.1%, which is crazy for a high risk, negative cashflow property. The cap rate if purchased at a price that would assume the mortgage at 2.4M would only be at 3% (with current occupancy). The pro-forma cap rate for full occupancy (minus 5% for vacancy) for purchase price of 2.4M would be 6.5%. Does that seem too risky? I would hope for a higher cap rate with the risk of buying a building with only 80% occupancy.

Thoughts?  How would you go about analyzing this deal?  What would you offer?