January 22, 2016

Berkshires on Elliott purchased for $91M

Courtesy Jones Lang LaSalle [enlarge]

Berkshires on Elliott, a five-story, 233-unit apartment complex at 2400 Elliott Ave., sold for $90.6 million.

Property records show Griffis Residential of Denver is the buyer. An entity that shares a Boston address with Berkshire Group is the seller.

The price equates to $388,841 per unit and about $525 per net square foot.

David Young, Corey Marx and Seth Heikkila of Jones Lang LaSalle brokered the sale.

The complex was developed in two phases in 1990 and 1992.

Griffis says on its website that it owns and manages 7,000 Class A apartments in Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Texas. The only other Washington property shown on the website is at 28700 34th Ave. S. in Auburn.

The Berkshires sale pushes the dollar volume so far this year over $265 million, according to Dupre + Scott Apartment Advisors' data.

Berkshires, combined with a sale of a 570-unit complex called Mill at Mill Creek for $115 million, make up much of this year's total.

This is a hot start to 2016, following a record year in 2015. More than $4.7 billion in apartment deals closed last year, besting the previous high of $3.3 billion in 2014, according to Dupre + Scott.

It wasn't the number of sales that made 2015 a record year. More sales occurred annually from 2003 to 2007 than the 419 that closed last year. More units changed hands in both 2005 and 2006 than the 22,930 units sold in 2015.

Prices — per unit and per square foot — are what made 2015 a record year. The average price per unit in 2015 was $172,981, ahead of 2014's record of $155,284. The average price per square foot in 2015 was $229.95. The only other time average price per square foot topped $200 was in 2014, according to Dupre + Scott.