Houston Investor Scores Apartment Tower in One of Atlanta's Top Deals This Year
05 Buckhead Becomes Lionstone Investments' Only Apartment Property in Atlanta
Original story featured on CoStar News - December 15, 2021
Houston-based Lionstone Investments bought 05 Buckhead for $69 million. (CoStar)
One of the first luxury apartment towers built in Atlanta’s Buckhead fetched one of the highest prices this year for an apartment sale to further burnish the metropolitan area’s reputation for attracting investors.
Houston-based Lionstone Investments bought the 155-unit 05 Buckhead from Coro Realty for $69 million, or $442,308 per unit, according to Fulton County property records. The per unit price is the second highest this year in the Atlanta area, according to CoStar data.
“What we are seeing in the multifamily investment sales market, and particularly in the Southeast, caused us to pursue a sale,” Sam Wilmoth, vice president at Atlanta-based Coro Realty, said in a statement.
Atlanta, in particular, has seen record apartment investment sales so far this year, hitting $14 billion through mid-December, according to a recent CoStar report by David Kahn, CoStar's director of market analytics for the Southeast. It has beaten the previous record of $8.5 billion in 2019 and is second behind the Dallas area in deal volume this year.
Lionstone didn’t respond to a request for comment. On its website, however, Andy Lusk, Lionstone’s chief investment officer, outlines the firm’s strategy in a video, saying that it is “focused on housing assets where fundamentals are proving more durable than in other sectors” and is targeting “hockey stick markets” where the firm believe the economic recovery is strongest. Those markets run from the Northwest into Texas and up through the Southeast to the Northeast.
The latest deal is the only apartment property Lionstone owns in the Atlanta area. It owns an office tower in Atlantic Station in Midtown and is partners with North American Properties in Colony Square, a mixed-used redevelopment that also is in Midtown. Lionstone recently sold an office building it developed in Dallas in a deal that set a per-square-foot record for Dallas-Fort Worth.
Coro Realty opened the 20-story 05 Buckhead in 2009 as the previous recession was raging. The towers are one residential piece of Buckhead Place, a development that now includes Marshall’s and LA Fitness. Atlanta-based Wood Partners has plans to build a 290-unit, eight-story apartment building next year.
Coro Realty’s 05 Buckhead was the first in Buckhead to have a rooftop deck and 24-hour concierge service seven days a week.
“The service levels and amenities of the luxury hotels in Buckhead inspired us to build 05 Buckhead,” John W. Lundeen III, Coro Realty's managing partner, said in the same statement.
SOURCE: CoStar News by Richard Lawson