City Realty's $23M Brookline bet rides on renovations

City Realty has closed on a $23.15 million multifamily portfolio in Brookline, Massachusetts, buying nine mostly unrenovated buildings that make up the Coolidge Corner Collection, a 65,262-square-foot package of 49 residential units and three commercial spaces that is 95 percent occupied. Just 12 percent of the units have been fully renovated, with another 57 percent partially upgraded. The sale drew nationwide interest from private and institutional investors after Colliers marketed it on behalf of Ramon Realty; the price works out to roughly $355 per square foot, a figure that prices in the renovation work ahead.

The renovation gap is the trade. As leases expire, City Realty can upgrade the 88 percent of units that still need work and push rents in a neighborhood the brokerage calls one of Brookline's most desirable, set near top medical and academic institutions, while the 31 percent of units untouched by any renovation give the new owner the longest runway to stage work lease by lease without taking on vacancy risk. That staging lets the owner fund improvements out of the property's own cash flow rather than front-loading capital, a current-cash-flow underwrite with a value-add kicker that this publication has argued is driving small and mid-sized apartment deals as cap rates reset upward. The renovation math is easier because new apartment supply stays scarce, a pinch the broader property recovery has made plain.

This deal is also a live test of Brookline's rent-control fight, where a proposed ballot initiative has cast uncertainty over the town's multifamily market, yet buyers kept bidding. Colliers' Frank Petz said the depth of interest 'throughout the process, despite uncertainty surrounding the proposed rent-control ballot initiative,' spoke to investor conviction and the opportunity to create value through unit improvements. Private capital, in other words, is treating the measure as a pricing question, not a dealbreaker.

The telling part is who showed up. A 95-percent-leased asset with 88 percent of units short of full renovation is the kind of property investors buy after doing the lease-by-lease renovation math, and the private buyers who bid did so on the strength of that plan; the winning offer priced unit-by-unit upside rather than waiting on a ballot measure. Those are the comps Greater Boston's suburban apartment market will be measured against, and sub-$25 million trades like this are where the apartment bid has broadened beyond core.