By Jack Stubbs
Roughly two months after selling the 230-Unit Altia Townhomes and Apartments in Lynnwood for $58 million to California-based FSC Realty, Goodman Real Estate—a Seattle-based real estate investment company that specializes in multifamily and commercial real estate across the U.S. and Canada.—sold another of its Puget Sound region assets.
On May 31st, the company sold the 72-Unit 205 Apartments in Shoreline to California-based Latigo Management Inc. for $21 million, or approximately $291,666 per unit, King County records show.
The 205 Apartments, located at 1795 NE 205th St., is a five-story apartment property built in 2018 that contains 72 units, according to the listing on apartments.com. The 205 Apartments offers a mix of studio- and one-bedroom units that range from 456 to 786 square feet.
According to the web site for 205 Apartments, the property offers a variety of community amenities including a community lounge and fitness room, a 1,600 square foot roof-deck, and an outdoor kitchen.
Located in the Ballinger neighborhood of Shoreline, the property offers easy access to major transit corridors, sitting less than half a mile from access to the intersection of State Route 104 and Interstate-5. The property is also adjacent to the Ballinger Shopping Center, which includes a number of retail amenities like 24-hour Fitness and Ballinger Thriftway Grocery Store.
The 205 Apartments is also roughly one mile south of Mountlake Terrace and five miles north of Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood, both areas that seen various transactions over the last few months, and have a number of large-scale development projects in the works.
As one notable example, Seattle-based Security Properties in mid-May spent $136.25 million, or approximately $266,113 per unit, to acquire the Taluswood Apartments located at 4208 236th Street SW in Mountlake Terrace from Chicago-based real estate investor Waterton Associates.
As the Puget Sound region continues to expand, transit-oriented infrastructural efforts are on the way, which will provide more connectivity in a growing metro. In early April, Skanska signed a contract with Sound Transit to complete enabling work for the Lynnwood Link L300 light rail expansion project in Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace. Construction began on the roughly 6-kilometer project began in March 2019 and is scheduled for completion in March 2020. When complete, riders will be able to travel from the Mountlake Terrace Transit Center—located just north of 236th St. Southwest and West of Veterans Memorial Park—to Northgate in ten minutes, according to Sound Transit’s web site.
There have not been too many multifamily transactions in Northgate over the last few months, though a number of in-the-works development projects—like the Northgate Mall Redevelopment—look set to change the fabric of the neighborhood. In November 2018, the Northeast Design Review Board approved the construction of a seven-story, 235-unit development located at 10700 5th Ave. NE.
As another example, the reinvention of the 55-acre Northgate Mall property—located at 401 NE Northgate Way—began some time ago, and attempts to expand and renovate the complex have occurred several times since its landmark opening in 1950. The project developer, Simon Property Group, recently received positive news about the large-scale redevelopment project, which will ultimately include 1.3 million square feet of mixed-use office, retail and parking space, over 1,000 housing units in four mixed-use residential towers, and two hotels totaling 372 rooms, as well as a 262,000 square foot ice-center which will serve as NHL Seattle’s new home.
As recently as late February 2019, Simon Property Group returned to the Northeast Design Review Board with its development partners—GGLO Design, KPFF, CallisonRTKL, Generator Studio and NHL Seattle—and secured the final design approval necessary to proceed with its plans to redevelop the site into a new “social heart” of Northgate.
Developers like Simon Property Group continue to look for creative ways to adaptively reuse and repurpose existing—and aging complexes—in expanding cities throughout the region. As another example, Merlone Geier Partners’ Shoreline Place project—located on the site of the 17-acre Sears Property near North 160th Street and Aurora Ave. in Shoreline—entails a redeveloping of the 1960s-era Aurora Square Sears and will include 75,000 square feet of retail and dining space, 1,358 apartment homes and various green spaces and community parks.
Such redevelopment undertakings like Northgate Mall and Shoreline Place—for which landscape architect HEWITT submitted its most-recent project plans in mid-March 2019—require long-term planning and coordination between private developers and city municipalities, and reflect developers’ attempts to to ensure the successful transformation of older properties in an evolving region.
Sears originally opened in Shoreline in 1967 and officially closed in April of 2018. And in 2013, the City of Shoreline designated Aurora Square—which is comprised of 70-plus acres of Sears-anchored space and adjacent properties—as a Community Renewal Area (CRA) in need of redevelopment. As part of the CRA, the city completed an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the redevelopment of the site in 2015.
