TA Realty pays $202 a foot and buys JPMorgan's 24-year exit

At $105.45 million, TA Realty's purchase of Polo Lakes Apartments in Wellington prices the 366-unit, 520,918-square-foot property at roughly $202 a square foot, or about $288,000 a door, but the number that will decide whether the trade works sits inside the rent roll rather than the land basis.

JPMorgan Investment Management sold the 2000-vintage complex on 19.2 acres; the South Florida Business Journal reports it paid $47.75 million in 2002, making the sale a 2.2x gross multiple on a 24-year hold, with no capital-spending figure since the purchase and no indication whether the position sat in a client account or on the manager's own book.

Units run from 795 to 1,554 square feet and rent from $1,974 to $5,341 a month, which at the extremes works out to $2.48 to $3.44 a square foot; amenities include a pool, clubhouse, tennis court and basketball court, and the coverage says nothing about unit interiors. The widest floor plans are roughly double the smallest, and if they also carry the top rents—a pairing the coverage does not confirm—the top of the stack earns about 38% more per foot than the bottom. That spread is the renovation case for a buyer paying $202 a foot.

Connect CRE describes the purchase as TA Realty's largest South Florida apartment deal since the firm's $118 million Pembroke Pines acquisition in early 2025, and at $288,000 a unit the print lands a quarter below TA's own recent South Florida costs. Core capital is arriving alongside the value-add buying: earlier this month a $300 million Alaska core mandate split three ways between Principal, AEW and TA Realty, putting a manager founded in 1982 and running more than $19 billion in total assets on both halves of the apartment bid. As this publication has argued, that bid has split into an income side paying for stabilized cash flow and a scarcity side underwriting land and the 2028-29 supply gap, with value-add pricing rather than core marks setting the clearing basis on 2000-vintage stock.

The seller's position is two-sided: Canyon and J.P. Morgan lent $74.7 million on a build-to-rent project in August, which makes a JPMorgan entity a lender against new supply this summer and a seller of 2000-vintage stock this month.

The floor is 795 square feet at $1,974 a month, or $2.48 a foot, against a top of the stack already at $3.44, and at $202 a foot the buyer has paid for that spread before disclosing a dollar of the capital that would close it.