TruAmerica Acquires Greater Salt Lake City Multifamily Portfolio for $102M
The communities are already 99 percent leased.
Southwillow Apartments
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
Salt Lake City—TruAmerica Multifamily and the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America have completed their purchase of two apartments in metro Salt Lake City for $102 million. Both properties are of mid-1980s vintage and are about seven miles from one another on Redwood Road, one of the state’s busier thoroughfares.
The properties include the 486-unit Somerset Village Apartment Homes in West Valley City, and the 440-unit Southwillow Apartments in West Jordan. The seller was San Francisco-based Jackson Square Partners. Altogether, the properties are 99 percent leased.
TruAmerica plans to invest an additional $8 million to reposition the two properties to market to an increasing renter pool of young professionals and working families in Salt Lake City. The renovations will include new countertops, appliance packages, cabinets and flooring, as well as such common area upgrades as community outdoor kitchens, dog parks and pool enhancements.
“We see Salt Lake City as the perfect apartment market,” said Greg Campbell, TruAmerica’s senior managing director of acquisitions. New jobs, he added, are attracting an increasing number of Millennials to the area, helping make Utah into the nation’s youngest state, with 32 percent of its population under the age of 32, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. “We find that 18 to 31 year olds are much more likely to rent than to buy.”
James Wadsworth and Greg Barratt of Berkadia represented both the buyer and seller in the transaction. The deal comes after TruAmerica’s acquisition last month of Settler’s Point, a 416-unit property in Salt Lake City, from Equus Capital Partners Ltd. for $46 million.
The L.A.-based TruAmerica entered the market in May with the acquisition of the Crossing at Daybreak, a 315-unit apartment property in South Jordan. The deals bring the total number of units under management in the Salt Lake City area for the company to 1,657.
