Dover Heights Apartment Homes, located in Newport Beach, California, have sold for $30,554,000 which are historic numbers of $463,000 per unit and $474 per square foot. The buyer was Waterford Residential, an active multifamily investor and developer that is a subsidiary of Waterford Property Company, owned by Sean Rawson and John Drachman. The seller was a local private investor. Kidder Mathews’ multifamily investment brokers, Steven Brombal and Josh Rhee represented both parties in the transaction.
This offering was rare, as it is the first time all these properties ever have been on the market in a single offering. The assemblage is significant, as most rental housing stock of this size and larger in Newport Beach is institutionally owned. The seller had owned the property for over the past 27 years and the offering of nine adjacent, contiguous lots is historic as only a few multifamily opportunities of this size will ever be available in Newport Beach or anywhere along Southern California coastal apartment submarkets from La Jolla to the Central Coast. Dover Heights Apartment Homes represent all but two ownership entities facing Bedford Lane, so this acquisition represented basically a “city block” in Newport Beach.
The apartment homes are located in Dover Shores, one of the most coveted, popular, and expansive Newport Beach neighborhoods. The community is steps from trendy restaurants and coffee houses as well as upscale boutiques along the 17th Street retail corridor. This area is rapidly re-gentrifying with remodeled apartment homes, office, medical office, and retail buildings. These 66 prized units and a previous sale in 2018 of an 18-unit building, directly adjacent to this assemblage and facing Westcliff Drive, to the same buyer and from the same seller, total 84 units which are situated on 10 separate parcels and have never before been offered for sale as a portfolio.
“There are nine individual parcels comprising this sale, and at any time an exit strategy could be to selectively and strategically sell individually to separate owners capitalizing on a “smaller building” offering with significantly higher fundamentals of price-per-unit and compressed cap rates coupled with a larger pool of potential investors,” said Brombal. “Typically, that exit strategy is simply not available in a community of this size,” he said.
With new multifamily construction in and around Newport Beach and the Irvine Business Complex logically being higher-end luxury complexes, this portfolio offered investors the ability to provide a more entry-level workforce housing alternative to Class-A communities in coastal locations serviced by upscale retail, dining, and entertainment. In these submarkets, comparable rents are anywhere from $3.00-$5.00 plus per square foot.
Multifamily market fundamentals are beginning to change, interest rates are continuing to rise, and irreplaceable and generational real estate assets are coming to market infrequently – or in this case and most likely, once in a lifetime. There is still a strong demand amongst savvy investors who understand the areas constraints and are willing to pay for the opportunity to add significant value through repositioning these assets.
“Over the last 27 plus years, I worked with the seller to assemble this portfolio of contiguous parcels. During that time, I had only one of the buildings formally listed, all others were from owners I had either sold the property to or had cultivated relationships with over many years. At one time, prior to this seller acquiring this assemblage, there were seven different owners of these 66 units,” said Brombal. “This assemblage is one of, if not the, largest contiguous privately held multifamily portfolios in the City of Newport Beach. The property is on nine adjacent parcels totaling 2.24 acres and 64,420 net rentable square feet of improvements. The amassing of these separate adjacent buildings over 27 years is really historic and unprecedented. We fielded multiple competing offers during the marketing period,” he said.
“This location is main and main in the Newport Beach area and offers residents the ability to walk to the Back Bay or across the street to some of the trendiest eateries and coffee houses,” said Rhee. “There are nine separate floor plans. This portfolio offers large townhomes with front and rear yards, large one-bedroom units, and two-bedroom, one-bath, and two-bedroom, two-bath flats with fireplaces, balconies, and large private yards,” he said.
The buyer is planning significant renovations to the interiors and exteriors of the property; in part by adding washer/dryer hook-ups in the units without that amenity already, and by activating vast common area spaces by adding outdoor communal resident retreats. With these extensive upgrades, it will be a top multifamily community in the submarket.
“The opportunity to acquire an asset of this size and scale in such a high barrier to entry market is remarkable,” said Rawson. “We are excited to position this asset at the top of the Dover Shores submarket and maximize its potential,” added Drachman.
About Kidder Mathews
Kidder Mathews is the largest independently owned commercial real estate firm on the West Coast, with over 750 real estate professionals and staff in 21 offices in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Arizona. Kidder Mathews offers a complete range of brokerage, appraisal, property management, consulting, project & construction management, and debt & equity finance services for all property types. The firm performs $7 billion in transactions, manages over 50 million square feet of space, and conducts over 1,500 appraisals annually.
