In 2016, Sam Zell said, “It’s very hard not to be a seller.”
Although New York City’s rental market has slowed two years later, Equity Residential still appears to have the selling spirit.
The residential real estate investment trust just sold a 13-story, 155-unit rental building on the Upper East Side, according to Marcus & Millichap, which brokered the deal.
Sources said the buyer, Hampshire Properties, paid just north of $85 million.
The market-rate Yorkville building, located between First and York avenues, sold at a cap rate of 3.18 percent. The deal closed late last week for about $550 per square foot.
Equity Residential bought the property for $62 million in 2006 from the London family, which had developed it in 1961. Anton, while at Eastern Consolidated, also brokered the 2006 deal. Prior to that sale, the building was long known as London House.
A Marcus & Millichap team led by Eric Anton represented Equity Residential. The sale was one of Anton’s first big deals since he left HFF last year.
Anton, who declined to identify the buyer or the price, said he targeted New York buyers with a value-add focus.
Equity Residential declined to comment, and Hampshire confirmed it was the buyer not declined to speak further.
Equity owns more than 300 properties over 77,000 apartments nationally. More than 10,000 of those units are in New York. In 2015, the company sold more than 23,000 apartments to Starwood Capital Group for $5.4 billion.
In February, executives for the firm said New York was its worst-performing market in the fourth quarter of 2017 and they projected it to be its weakest market in 2018.
Hampshire, a Brooklyn-based multifamily investment firm led by Tomas and Daniel Rosenthal, is developing a 300-unit rental building in Midwood. Its most recent acquisition was a pair of adjacent Upper West Side buildings for $37.6 million in 2016.