By Jack Stubbs
San Francisco-based Carmel Partners, a company that invests in multifamily assets—both renovation projects and ground-up developments—in seven core markets across the U.S., recently acquired a storage/warehouse in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.
On February 28th, in a transaction that was recently recorded, the company spent $13.8 million to acquire a two-story storage warehouse on Stone Way N., public documents show. The seller of the property was Sealib Properties LLC, an entity affiliated with Elizabeth Tellessen and based in Spokane, WA.
The subject property, a warehouse/storage located at 3665 Stone Way N., totals 16,208 square feet and was originally built in 1946, according to public documents. The building, which sits on just over half an acre, is currently occupied by Stonewall Electric Supply, a distributor of electrical supplies that operates out of 18 different warehouse locations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
The supply warehouse is just a few blocks from Gas Works Park—which offers neighborhood residents sweeping views of the adjacent Lake Union—and roughly half a mile east of the Fremont Sunday Street Market. The building is also roughly two miles north of Seattle’s bustling South Lake Union neighborhood, a few miles north of where Carmel Partners has a multifamily development in the works.
In early March, a 226-unit project—located at 1100 Boylston Ave. in First Hill and proposed by San Francisco-based Carmel Partners and Encore Architects—was reviewed at a fourth Design Review meeting, where the board members agreed that more work would need to be done to refine the overall massing and exterior materiality of the building.
Ultimately, the project team seeks to redevelop a surface parking lot into an eight-story residential building in the First Hill neighborhood in Seattle. While the site is zoned for high-rise development, Carmel and Encore have proceeded with plans for a mid-rise building in an effort to more gracefully transition between high-rise buildings in the surrounding neighborhoods to smaller structures, such as the adjacent First Baptist Church.
Carmel Partners’ local portfolio also includes Hyde Square, a six-building, 618-unit project in Northeast Bellevue near Lake Sammamish, which includes various features like a 4,800-square-foot state-of-the-art fitness center, as well as 75,000 square feet of landscaped courtyards.
It is not entirely clear what plans the company has for the recently-acquired warehouse property across Lake Washington in Fremont.
In terms of its development strategy, Carmel Partners looks to target the nation’s most desirable, supply-constrained markets, and the company’s land acquisition and development team uses informed vision to identify attractive or overlooked opportunities in tight markets, according to its web site.
