Two West Coast Apartment Trades Cleared at $500,000 and $700,000 a Unit

Key Highlights

• Decron Properties bought 5550 Wilshire Boulevard, a 163-unit, 2010-built apartment building with 14,686 sf of fully leased retail (Chipotle, Five Guys, FedEx Office), for $114M — about $699,000 per unit.
• It is Decron's first Los Angeles acquisition in nearly two years; the firm called the price a substantial discount to replacement cost. JLL's Blake Rogers represented both sides.
• TA Realty paid $102M for Boulder Creek, a 204-unit property in Sammamish, WA, 17 miles east of Seattle — $500,000 per unit, per CRE Direct.
• Both trades are 2000s-vintage, suburban-to-urban-core, in coastal metros with restrictive entitlement regimes.
• Neither seller nor cap rate was disclosed in either transaction.

The Signal

• Two institutional buyers paid $500K–$700K a door in the same week and both framed it as cheap relative to building new.
• Coastal multifamily is being priced off construction cost, not off current NOI — which is what happens when the pipeline collapses.
• The Sun Belt-to-coast rotation has a Sept 18 data point: a Sun Belt-heavy buyer re-entered Los Angeles.

What is happening: two apartment trades closed 1,100 miles apart with the same underwriting logic. Decron re-entered Los Angeles at roughly $699K per unit; TA Realty bought suburban Seattle at $500K per unit. In both cases the buyer's justification was that the price sits below what it would cost to build the same building today.

Why it matters: replacement-cost underwriting is a bet on supply. Both buyers are pointing at the same thing: Measure ULA transfer-tax friction and construction costs in Los Angeles, and near-zero rental deliveries on Seattle's Eastside, mean little new product will compete with a 2010-vintage building for the balance of the decade. Buyers paying these numbers are assuming rent growth returns because the pipeline is not coming.

The Decron detail: a firm that spent two years buying Sun Belt garden product came back to L.A. and called the market chronically undersupplied. That is the reverse of the 2021–2023 capital flow, and it is the first clear print of coastal re-entry by a Sun Belt-oriented private owner this quarter.

The TA Realty detail: $500K a unit for 204 units in Sammamish is a core-plus price for a suburban asset. Boston-based TA is buying the Eastside tech employment base and the lack of new deliveries, not a value-add plan.

Caution: neither cap rate was disclosed; replacement-cost claims are the buyer's framing. Per-unit figures are derived from reported price and unit counts.

Implications

• For coastal multifamily owners: the marginal bid has moved to replacement-cost logic, which supports pricing even where NOI growth is flat.
• For Sun Belt sellers: the capital that chased Phoenix and Austin in 2022 is starting to rotate back to supply-constrained coasts.
• For developers: if buyers pay $700K a door for 2010 vintage, ground-up in the same submarket needs to deliver below that all-in to pencil — and mostly cannot.

Coastal apartments are being priced off what it costs to build, and buyers are betting nothing gets built.