Real estate notebook: Apartment deals accelerated at year's end

For apartment-building sales in the Twin Cities metro, 2017 was a banner year.

We have already reported about the astounding 19 offers that were made on the Riverwalk Townhomes and Flats, an apartment and office condo property in Minneapolis' North Loop. The Cushman & Wakefield team of Lance Steiger and Robert Dulin represented the seller in the $19.2 million sale, which closed on Dec. 15. Goodman Real Estate, a Seattle-based real estate investment company, was the buyer.

That kind of enthusiasm for well-located apartments in the Twin Cities wasn't an anomaly. Here are a few others that closed last month:

• Marcus & Millichap brokered the sale of 1091 Goodrich Avenue, a 13-unit, apartment building in St. Paul for $1.52 million. Dan Linnell, Mox Gunderson, Evan Miller, and Josh Talberg had the exclusive listing to market the property on behalf of the seller, a private investor, and secured the buyer, also a private investor.

• The Investment Services Team at Colliers International in Minneapolis, including Ted Bickel, Jeff Budish and Brady DeVore represented At Home Apartments in the sale of White Pines Apartments at 1324 Eagle Creek Blvd. in Shakopee. The buyer was New York-based Abacus Capital Group, which paid $14.5 million for the 123-unit property. Bickel, senior vice president at Colliers International, said the deal "illustrates the strength of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro market as a whole and particularly the increasing national investor appetite for outer ring suburban opportunities, which is a relatively new phenomena."

• The Investment Services Team at Colliers International | Minneapolis-St. Paul also represented Denver-based Forum Real Estate Group in the sale of Solhaus, and Solhaus Tower, two multifamily, campus housing properties at 2428 Delaware St. SE. and 515 Huron Blvd. SE. in Minneapolis. The properties, which include 150 units, are about a block away from each other near the University of Minnesota campus. San Francisco-based FPA paid $27.4 million for both properties. FPA now owns 10 properties in the Twin Cities and has more than 25,000 units nationwide.

• The CBRE Multifamily team of Keith Collins, Abe Appert, Ted Abramson and Ike Hoffman represented the owner of Granite Woods Apartments, a 192-unit property at 3925 Lancaster Lane N. in Plymouth, for $24.5 million. The seller was Arlington Arms LLC, an entity related to St. Louis Park-based Main Street Cos. The buyer is Granite Woods Minneapolis LLC, an entity controlled by Curtis Capital Group of Bellevue, Wash.