CBRE arranges $53M sale of 125-unit Lacey townhome community

CBRE has arranged the $53 million sale of Chambers Reserve, a 125-unit townhome community in Lacey, Washington, with Jordan Louie, Eli Hanacek, Kyle Yamamoto and Natalie Kasper of the brokerage representing the seller. The price works out to roughly $424,000 a door, or about $244 a foot on the average 1,736-square-foot unit, and those are the only two measures the report supports because it carries no rent roll, occupancy figure or cap rate.

Chambers Reserve was built in 2023 on 8.33 acres at 3725 Wildspitz St. SE, a site near Interstate 5 with access to Olympia, Tacoma and the broader Puget Sound region, and it comprises 23 townhome buildings in a mix of three- and four-bedroom plans. The units come with two-car garages, private decks, air conditioning, quartz counters and stainless appliances, while residents share a 24-hour fitness center, a seasonal swimming pool and a clubhouse. Louie described the community as a chance for investors to acquire newly constructed rental housing in a growing region, and credited the floor plans, amenities and proximity to several major employment centers with the interest the offering drew, according to the Connect CRE report.

Neither side of the trade is named, and no financing is disclosed, which leaves the headline price as the only number to work with, a per-unit figure rather than a yield. CBRE has figured in 73 stories in these pages, and the range of what it brokers is the interesting part: in August we examined a CBRE-brokered sale of office buildings in Norwalk that a joint venture plans to convert into 286 apartments, a deal whose value sat in the buildings' next use. Chambers Reserve needs no conversion math, tells no repositioning story, and its three-year-old rent roll does not appear in the public account of the sale.

Apartment pricing has been resetting on rent and basis rather than scarcity, and a 2023-completed townhome community with garages and four-bedroom plans sits exactly where those two readings diverge: a buyer underwriting the income stream pays one number, a buyer underwriting replacement cost pays another. The report does not say which reading set the price, whether the seller was the developer or a fund that bought at certificate of occupancy, or what the buyer intends to do with the asset. It hands the market a Puget Sound comparable at $424,000 a door for newly built attached rental housing, along with a second question it never answers, since an eight-acre, 125-door site with 23 buildings is not a layout most buyers can replicate at that basis. The next townhome community to trade along the I-5 corridor will be measured against it.

The useful detail for sellers may be the marketing itself: a four-person CBRE team, an amenity list built around suburban family renters, and a sale that closed without the buyer's name attached. If rental townhomes near Olympia are clearing at $424,000 a unit in 2026, developers still holding entitled land in the corridor have a number to plug into their pro formas, and a reason to test the market before the next wave of deliveries does it for them.