A Yorba Linda apartment complex has traded hands for nearly $206 million, the largest rental property sale seen in Orange County in at least five years, according to real estate industry data.
The 400-unit Bryant at Yorba Linda complex sold late last month for $205.5 million, or $514,000 per unit, property records indicate.
The complex, built in 1986, is just north of the Riverside (91) Freeway, along River Bend Drive. The nearly 26-acre complex is less than a mile west of the Green River Golf Club and the city of Corona.
The Bryant totals 54 buildings running about 400,000 square feet. It was about 94% full at the time of sale, according to data from real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
An affiliate of Los Altos-based Interstate Equities Corp. bought the garden-style complex and took out a $153 million loan with a unit of Dallas’ Invesco to fund the deal, according to property records.
The transaction marks the largest commercial property sale in Yorba Linda in at least a decade, according to data from CoStar.
It’s Interstate’s first big reported deal in OC in four years; in early 2018 it paid about $134 million for Huntington Beach’s Breakwater complex. That deal worked out to a price of around $335,000 per unit.
Active Seller
The seller of the Yorba Linda complex was Philadelphia-based Resource REIT, a non-traded real estate investment trust. It paid about $118 million, or $295,000 a unit, for the Bryant in 2015.
The REIT disclosed in its last quarterly report that the Yorba Linda property and a handful of others it owned out of the area were expected to trade in early 2022 but didn’t disclose the name of the buyer of the time.
Late last month, Resource REIT said that its remaining properties—42 complexes totaling around 12,600 units—were being sold to Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust for $3.7 billion, including the assumption of debt.
None of those 42 garden-style complexes are in OC.
The deal with Blackstone put a value around $294,000 a unit for Resource REIT’s remaining portfolio, which is concentrated in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Texas.
Record Stretch
The Bryant’s sale continues a trend of big-dollar apartment sales taking place in OC the past year, amid a boom period for multifamily property owners.
Rents in OC are up over 10% year-over-year, and vacancy rates for apartments in the county are under 3%, according to industry data.
There were 13 apartment complex sales in the county topping $100 million in 2021, according to CoStar data. That compares to two such $100 million-plus deals in 2020, five in 2019, and six in 2018.
Per-unit pricing for the 2021 deals, which include several recently built complexes, ranged from $400,000 at Anaheim’s Paramount Platinum Triangle to $579,000 for Fullerton’s Amplifi.
The two priciest reported deals last year were for a pair of adjacent properties in Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle, the $194 million for the Jefferson Rise complex and $186 million for the Jefferson Edge complex, which in total count 747 units.
Those two properties, each built by multifamily developer JPI/TDI, sold for about $509,000 per unit on average.
The 2-year-old Platinum Triangle complexes were both bought by an affiliate of Atlanta-based PGIM Real Estate in separate transactions in December.
