Rise Properties sells Kent apartments for $72M, 11% below 2019 basis

Rise Properties Trust has sold The Grove, a 366-unit apartment complex at 10811 Southeast 239th Place in Kent, Washington, to Irvine-based Trinity Property Consultants for $72 million, or $196,721 a unit, slightly above this year's per-unit average in south King County, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. That price is 11 percent below the $81 million Rise paid MG Properties for the complex in 2019.

Its July exit in the same submarket went the other way, with Bower Village, 198 units, selling to Oso Capital Advisors for $45 million against a 2019 purchase from Elan Multifamily Investments at $43.1 million — a print of roughly $227,000 a unit that came in above both The Grove's and its own basis. Two Kent complexes bought by the same owner in the same year have left its books a few months apart, one at a loss and one at a gain, which points to markdowns being taken asset by asset rather than applied across a vintage.

Bower Village's 182,000 square feet across 198 units average about 919 square feet, while The Grove's units average 800 across 31 buildings on 20 acres developed in two phases in the early 1980s — smaller, older units clear lower, but Trinity is paying above the county average regardless.

Institutional Property Advisors' Philip Assouad, Giovanni Napoli, Ryan Harmon, Nick Ruggiero and Anthony Palladino represented the seller and secured the buyer. The report also puts a $56.4 million acquisition loan against the property, maturing Dec. 1, and does not identify the borrower; whether that debt is Rise's 2019 financing coming due or the buyer's new paper is unresolved, and if it is the former, the sale looks like a maturity met with an exit.

Trinity is consolidating rather than diversifying, renaming the complex ReNew Meridian as its 12th acquisition in the area and sixth in Kent — enough scale to spread management and capital spending across a submarket it already knows. Puget Sound closed the second quarter at 95.4 percent occupancy, up from 94.9 percent in the first, per CBRE, so the rent roll is not what is setting the price.

Kent's older stock is where the arithmetic gets tested. Puget Sound owners are still working off bases set years ago — this publication reported in September on Onni's $41.7 million loan against a $358 million Seattle project whose land basis dates to 2018. Rise is resolving its own version of that by selling, and the coverage does not say how much of the Seattle-area portfolio is left to go. Dec. 1, when the loan matures, is the next date this file carries.