N.Y. apartment investor buys Bonita Apartments

BUYER: Blue River Capital LLC (Robert Wetenhall Jr.), New York City

SELLER: Eastside Equities LLC

PROPERTY: 808 Miramar St., Cape Coral

PRICE: $650,000

PREVIOUS PRICE: $1.92 million, January 2006

LAW FIRM ON DEED: Bill McFarland PA, Cape Coral

PLANS, DESCRIPTION: Eastside Equities LLC flipped the 31-unit Bonita Apartments to New York City-based Blue River Capital LLC for a $216,000 profit. The Jupiter company recently purchased the bank-owned property and resold it in 10 days to Blue River Capital for $650,000.

The price equated to $20,968 per unit.

The three-building property was 25% occupied at the time of the sale. The development features nine studios, 20 one-bedroom and two-bedroom units.

Kevin Kelleher, Bob Goldfinger and Darron Kattan of Franklin Street represented the seller and Jim Cahill of Cahill Realty Group represented the buyer.

“It was your typical foreclosure situation, where management had slipped during the process, and the bank had to further clear out problem tenants once it went REO,” Kelleher says in a press release.

“The buyer believed in the long-term fundamentals of the location and has been buying up multiple local properties with the belief that we are at the bottom of the value cycle.”

The property needed an additional $150,000 to $200,000 in improvements, Kelleher says, and many of the units were not rentable in their current condition.

According to Chris Lally, the Lee County property manager for Blue River Capital LLC, the apartment development still made sense, even at the premium price.

“The most important thing for us to do was to keep rents under $650 a month,” Lally says. “Over that and people tend to look to rent a single-family home.”

Blue River Capital LLC owns and operates 140 apartment units in Lee County. Its properties are currently 93% occupied.