Griffis Residential Acquires 373 Apartments in Milpitas for $154M

Griffis Residential Investments has bought a 373-unit apartment complex in Milpitas for $153.5 million.

The Denver area-based firm purchased the four-story apartments at 501 Murphy Ranch Road, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. The seller was San Diego-based Fairfield Residential, which developed the complex 10 years ago.

The cost works out to $411,500 per unit.

The complex, formerly called Cerano, was renamed Griffis South Bay. It’s the first Northern California property picked up by Griffis, which invests in newer apartment complexes.

“We see (Silicon Valley) as the center of the world economy. There’s a lot of great innovation that occurs there,” Jim DiRienzo, the firm’s senior vice president for investments, told the Business Journal. “We think that there’s a bright future, so we felt like it was a decent time to make an entrance” into the market.

The Mediterranean-style apartments are across the street from the headquarters for KLA, a tech equipment firm, and close to Cisco Systems and Western Digital campuses.

Griffis represented itself in the sale. Broker Sal Saglimbeni of Marcus & Millichap’s Institutional Property Advisors held the listing.

Although the complex is Griffis’ first in Silicon Valley, the company is interested in buying more properties in the area, DiRienzo said. His company tends to operate clusters of apartment properties for ease of management.

Griffis also owns a pair of complexes in San Diego and more than 20 in Greater Denver. In all, it owns and manages more than 8,000 apartments in Colorado, California, Texas and Washington state, according to its website.

The purchase is among the largest multifamily real estate deals in the Bay Area in months, according to the Business Journal.

In January, Palo Alto-based Spieker Companies bought a 248-unit complex in Sunnyvale for $106 million. In October, Irvine-basedTrinity Property Consultants bought three older complexes in San Jose for $135 million.

Last month, two investors involved in separate deals picked up apartment complexes in San Jose and Palo Alto for a combined $51 million.

— Dana Bartholomew