January 7, 2025

Greystar sells U District student-housing tower for over $124M

Photo by Moris Moreno Photography [enlarge]

Accolade is part of the early wave of high-rise student housing projects to follow the University District’s upzone.

In the University District, Greystar has sold its fairly new Accolade student housing tower for $124.4 million to an LLC associated with Goldman Sachs.

King County recorded the sale last week. Via an LLC, Greystar assembled the midblock site in 2020 for about $19.6 million. Exxel Pacific then built the 21-story project at 4126 12th Ave. N.E., with Weber Thompson as the architect.

The LEED Gold-certified project opened in late 2022. It has 226 units with 597 beds, the standard metric in student housing.

The new owner of record is 4126 12th Ave NE Owner LLC. Brokers were not announced. The deal was worth about $736 per square foot. There's no sign of a new loan, or the assumption of a prior JPMorgan loan from 2023. The new LLC is associated with a REIT likely to include various institutional investors.

Accolade is a short walk east to the University of Washington campus, and a few blocks north to U District Station. It has no retail or parking, but tenants have 192 bike stalls.

A long list of amenities includes more than one gym, indoor and outdoor study and lounge spaces, landscaped decks on the third and top floors, hot tubs, a rock-climbing wall and TV lounges.

Not a part of last week's deal was the landmarked little Villa Camini apartments. Greystar acquired that nearby building, and its air rights, as part of its 2020 assemblage. It then sold those seven apartments — but not the air rights — before construction began on Accolade. A Colliers-related investment group owns that two-story Mediterranean Revival-style building, now a century old.