A joint venture between Holland Partner Group and NASH has sold Volta on Pine in Long Beach to Gelt for $156 million. The 271-unit apartment complex has 1,300 square feet of ground floor retail space and is located in Downtown Long Beach. To complete the sale, Gelt secured $91.3 million in financing.
The property is located in Space Beach, an area of Downtown Long Beach that has recently become a hub for aerospace companies with start-ups like SpinLaunch, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space, all of which have their headquarters offices in the market. The wider area has even greater access to employment hubs with an estimated 950,000 jobs in the Greater Los Angeles and Orange County markets.
Volta on Pine was built by the North America Sekisui House Holland JV in 2021, and Walker & Dunlop brokers Blake A. Rogers, Alexandra Caniglia, Kevin Sheehan, Hunter Combs and Javier Rivera represented the joint venture in the sale. Nuveen’s Mark Grace, John Montakab and Trevor Fase arranged the financing on behalf of Gelt.
Gelt has been closing some major deals in the Western US as it scales its multifamily portfolio. In 2020, the firm closed its largest acquisition at the time with the purchase of Kallisto at Bear Creek, a 472-unit apartment property in Denver, for $145.5 million. With this acquisition, Gelt now has a portfolio of more than 2,500 properties in the Denver metro. This property gave them the opportunity to purchase a substantial number of units in a highly desired suburb of Denver. The deal was smaller than this current transaction.
The Greater Los Angeles apartment market has quickly rebounded from the pandemic. In September, a report from Marcus & Millichap showed that apartment leasing was at a 15-year high, illustrating the strong renter demand. Demand has been so healthy that vacancy has fallen to 4% and rents are up 3% for the year. Job growth is behind the market’s swift recovery. In the second quarter, 89,000 jobs were added to the employment market. At the same time, 9,700 units were leased and the county added 37,000 new households to Los Angeles County. Marcus & Millichap expects equally strong job growth in the second half of the year, ultimately predicting that 250,000 jobs will be added to the market this year.