By Jack Stubbs
An apartment community in Redmond changed hands late last week.
On Friday, April 20th, the Townside Flats Apartments in Redmond sold for $13.4 million, or approximately $326,829 per unit, according to public records filed with King County. The buyer was Townside Flats I LLC, an entity affiliated with Joseph E. Mayer based in Tacoma. The seller was Pleasant Valley Ranch LLC, an entity affiliated with Paul H. Murai based in Santa Barbara, California.
The three-story Townside Flats Apartments, located at 7910 170th Place NE., was built in 1988 and contains 41 units, according to the property listing on apartments.com. The property offers one-bedroom units (which range from 620 to 670 square feet) and two-bedroom units (which total 850 square feet), according to the property’s web site.
Some of the in-unit amenities include hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, quartz countertops and private patio/balcony, and some of the community amenities available to residents include covered parking, a dog park and outdoor courtyard. The apartment complex is newly-renovated and offers various green features including recycling and online rent payments and work orders, according to the web site.
The property is less than one mile from Redmond Town Center and the Redmond Square shopping mall, and also sits in close proximity to outdoor recreational areas like Marymoor Park and the Burke-Gilman Trail. Additionally, the asset is less than half a mile from access to Washington State Route 520.
The active multifamily market in the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area (encompassing King, Pierce and Snohomish counties) shows no signs of slowing over the coming months, as the housing shortage, job growth and investor confidence in the region continues to drive the multifamily sector, according to a 2018 Multifamily North American Investment Forecast report written by Marcus & Millichap.
The report predicts that the employment numbers in the Seattle-Tacoma metro will expand by 2 percent (adding 40,000 jobs) in 2018 as the availability of skilled labor shrinks. The report also predicts that a slowdown in construction means that demand will outpace supply growth, dropping the vacancy rate to 3.4 percent at the end of 2018. Rent growth will climb in 2018 to an average of $1,643 per month (an increase of 5.4 percent from 2017), according to the report.
