Bell Partners Closes $930M Multifamily Fund

Bell Totem Lake. Image courtesy of Bell Partners

Bell Partners has completed the final close for its core multifamily venture that includes Bell Core Fund I. The company anticipates the venture’s total equity capitalization once fully invested will be $930 million from a range of domestic and international institutional investors.

The fund targets newer, institutional-grade assets that generate consistent cash flow with strong appreciation over a long-term investment horizon of around 12 years, noted Lili Dunn, president & incoming CEO of Bell Partners.

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“Our core strategy will acquire properties that require no material value-add activities such as a renovation or management repositioning. Acquired assets generally will have been completed in 2014 or later with solid construction details that result in lower annual capital expenditures,” Dunn told Multi-Housing News.

Using leverage, the venture intends to purchase more than $1.8 billion in multifamily assets in 14 major markets across the U.S, including Boston, metropolitan Washington, the Southeast, Texas, Denver and the West Coast.

Venture Actively Investing

The company began acquiring multifamily properties through the fund with its purchase of the 202-unit Bell Totem Lake in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, Wash., in April 2021. Since then, it has bought seven more properties, including the 180-unit Bell Mt. Tam in the San Francisco Bay area; the 355-unit Bell Terminus and the 256-unit Bell Collier Village in Atlanta; the 272-unit Bell Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, N.C.; the 395-unit Bell Warner Center in Los Angeles; the 435-unit Bell CityLine in Dallas and the 339-unit Bell Lakeshore in Austin, Texas. The combined purchase price of all eight properties was more than $900 million.

Dunn noted that Bell uses its vertically integrated platform to manage every property it acquires through a fund or a separately managed account. The company manages a portfolio of 70,000 apartment homes across the country.

“We have the advantage of scale, access to state-of-the-art technology and extensive market research … to drive investment performance throughout the entire asset life cycle,” Dunn said.

Bell created its fund platform in 2006 and has since closed eight funds with total equity commitments of $3.5 billion.