Ninety-Five Eastlake Units, And The Agency Covered Fifty-Nine Percent

Sequel Investment Company and Evergreen Gavekal acquired East Howe Steps, 95 units in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, for $35.05 million — $368,947 per unit — from Bender Equities, financed with a $20.6 million Freddie Mac loan at 58.8% loan-to-value. The asset comprises two four-story buildings completed in 2016 plus 3,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Institutional Property Advisors brokered the sale and IPA Capital Markets arranged the acquisition financing. It is the partnership's second Seattle-area multifamily purchase within a year.

Two cautions belong up front. Kidder Mathews characterized the trade as occurring at a 26% discount without specifying the reference basis, so treat that as directional rather than as a comp. And Connect CRE published $35 million and $351,579 per unit; the $35.05 million figure is used here because it reconciles arithmetically against 95 units, while the per-unit figure does not.

Eastlake is a dense, land-constrained Seattle neighborhood between Lake Union and I-5, walkable to South Lake Union employment, with almost no capacity for new supply. A 2016-vintage, 95-unit asset there is close to the smallest institutional-quality product a buyer can acquire in that submarket.

The financing is what makes this legible. At 58.8% LTV, Freddie Mac underwrote in-place cash flow and left roughly 41% of the capital stack to equity. That is not a stretch execution — it is a lender comfortable with the market and a buyer who did not need leverage to clear the price.

A repeat buyer taking a second Seattle asset within twelve months is a conviction signal in a metro that spent two years on most institutional avoid-lists. The 3,000 square feet of ground-floor retail is small enough to be a neighborhood amenity rather than a leasing exposure, which is the right size for it to be.

Implications. Agency execution at conservative leverage is the quiet indicator worth watching in gateway multifamily. When Freddie will write 59% against a small urban asset, the debt markets have made a judgment about the submarket that precedes any recovery in the transaction count. For sponsors, the read is that Seattle infill is financeable again at ordinary terms — which matters more to deal flow than any rent-growth forecast.