Ground Broken for Arlington Apartments
More multifamily ground has been broken in the red-hot metro Washington, D.C., market with the beginning of Grayson Flats Arlington, a 67-unit apartment building.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
Arlington, Va.—More multifamily ground has been broken in the red-hot metro Washington, D.C., market with the beginning of Grayson Flats Arlington, a 67-unit apartment building near Arlington, Va.’s Courthouse Metro station. Buvermo Investments of Bethesda, Md., is the equity partner in the $25 million development, which is slated for completion in October.
Grayson Flats is being built on a 1.67-acre site that Insight acquired in 2010. The company demolished an existing 55-year-old apartment complex on the site and is replacing it with the new structure. Cardinal Bank provided a $19 million construction loan for the project.
According to developer Insight Property Group LLC, Lessard Design Inc. and Preston Partnership designed the building to offer apartments larger than typical Ballston/Rosslyn area offerings. The property’s units will average 1,100 square feet, but the largest of them—with two bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and a den—will offer over 1,450 square feet of living space. Some residences will have their own 400-square-foot rooftop terraces and all of the units will have large transom windows.
The development is the first by Insight, though in fact the company is no novice when it comes to multifamily. Founded in 2009 by longtime multifamily industry veterans Richard Hausler and Michael Blum, the Tysons Corner, Va.-based Insight has acquired over 500 existing apartments and has over 1,000 more multifamily units in its current development pipeline.
According to investment specialist Marcus & Millichap, 2012 will be another good year for the DC multifamily market. Employment is projected to increase by 1.5 percent, or 44,000 jobs, spurring demand and driving vacancies down 40 basis points to 4 percent by the end of the year. Effective rents will rise market-wide to an estimated 4.8 percent. About 4,700 apartment units are currently under way in the market, enough to add a modest 1.2 percent to the metro D.C .rental stock.
