Marcus & Millichap brokers $8.9M Brighton apartment sale

Marcus & Millichap closed the sale of 15 Euston Rd., a 24-unit apartment building in Boston's Brighton neighborhood, for $8,875,000, Connect CRE reported on Oct. 23.

The seller was a private family and the buyer a partnership, according to the report, which does not name either party. Marcus & Millichap's Boston office marketed the building for the seller and procured the buyer. The four-story, 19,200-square-foot property was built in 1962 on a 0.22-acre lot with off-street parking and sits 0.1 miles from Sutherland Road Station.

At $8,875,000 for 24 units, the trade works out to about $370,000 a unit and about $462 a square foot. That is above the $8.5 million sale of a 29-unit Anaheim building, which comes to about $293,000 a unit; the two properties are in different markets and vintages, so the gap says as much about location as pricing. For advisors with Boston multifamily exposure through private funds or non-traded vehicles, the per-unit figure is a starting assumption, not a valuation mark: it records one partnership's purchase, not what a fund's Boston apartments are worth.

The report does not disclose cap rate, rents, net operating income or financing terms. For a manager with Boston exposure, the due-diligence question is what per-unit basis and going-in yield its assets carry, and how old the appraisal behind them is.

Evan Griffith, a senior managing director in the Boston office, said Brighton is one of the least-traded apartment submarkets in the country. He also said a record number of groups toured the asset, though the report puts no figure to that claim. Griffith's characterization is not an independently published tally. The next Boston sale in the same size band will test it.