$67M DuPage sale prices two garden assets 13% apart

The $67.25 million that Axiom Properties Inc. collected for two DuPage County apartment communities reads as one trade and settles as two, and the split between the buyers and between the two prices per unit says more about suburban Chicago pricing than the headline total does. Northmarq's Midwest Investment Sales team ran the sale.

B & A Property Group, LLC paid $46 million for Westmore Apartments, 230 garden units on roughly 11.5 acres at 1049 S. Westmore-Meyers Road in Lombard, $200,000 a door, while FPA Multifamily paid $21.25 million for Whispering Trails, 120 all-two-bedroom units at 103 S. Testa Drive in Naperville, about $177,100 a door. Blended across 350 units, the basis lands near $192,150, within one percent of the $194,000 a unit our pages recorded earlier this month for a 121-unit portfolio in Ukiah, California, and while two trades do not make a national comp set, the near-match suggests these buyers were underwriting the rent roll in front of them—occupancy, unit mix, acreage—rather than paying up for a metro on the offering memo.

Westmore is the older asset, built in 1968 against Whispering Trails' 1985, and it commands the higher basis anyway, with the marketing material reporting it 98% occupied and carrying one-, two- and three-bedroom floorplans against a uniform two-bedroom community in Naperville. A buyer paying the premium basis for a 1968 suburban building with a full rent roll is buying in-place cash flow and the flexibility that three floorplans give a renovation schedule, while the buyer at the lower basis takes 120 identical units and a rent roll with no floorplan variance in it, a different asset profile carrying different return math. Roughly 13 percent per door is what the market charged to choose between them.

Northmarq's Parker Stewart, Dominic Martinez, Alex Malzone and Jake Lamb worked the assignment, and Stewart read the interest in both properties as a comment on their long-term upside and their DuPage County locations, but broker optimism on its own is worth little. The two-buyer outcome is worth something: had the appetite for the smaller, uniform building thinned, one buyer would likely have taken the pair at a discount to the sum of the parts, and the same $67.25 million would have described a much thinner bid at the sub-$25 million check size. The 120-unit piece clearing on its own answers the question that matters to anyone holding small garden assets: whether a mature suburban building still draws a buyer willing to write a whole check rather than wait for a portfolio to be assembled around it.

Multifamily prices have been splitting by vintage, occupancy and buyer type, and a 350-unit offering in one Illinois county is far too small to settle that argument and does not try. It locates the split instead: inside a single portfolio, between a 1968 asset and a 1985 one, from one seller, priced about 13 percent apart per door.