Tampa apartment investor adds Arbors at Belleair to portfolio

BUYER: Rifai Properties LLC (principals: Hany Rifai), Tampa

SELLER: West Coast Holdings LLC and Sark Properties I LLC

PROPERTY: 2230 Nursery Road, Clearwater

PRICE: $6.6 million

PREVIOUS PRICE: $6.9 million, August 2007

LAW FIRM ON DEED: Bush Ross PA, Tampa

PLANS, DESCRIPTION: Investor Hany Rifai purchased the 120-unit Arbors at Belleair in Clearwater for $6.6 million.

The price equated to $55,000 per unit or $63 per square foot.

The gated 5-acre garden-style apartment complex features 10 buildings with 12 units each. In 2008, the property received a $500,000 renovation, which included construction of a new fitness center and clubhouse. The roofs of all its buildings were also replaced recently.

The development features a security office, several laundry facilities, a swimming pool and fitness center. It was 85% occupied at the time of the sale.

Darron Kattan, Bob Goldfinger and Kevin Kelleher, all of Franklin Street Real Estate Services, handled the transaction.

“We're planning to redo the cabinets, tile the floors and replace the landscaping,” Rifai says. “My general belief is that prices in Florida are just going to continue to climb. They have been on the upswing starting over the last year and half.”

The property also included five or six unrentable units that the new owner plans to fix up and put back out to lease. He says the Arbors at Belleair purchase price equated to a payoff ratio based on income (capitalization rate) after the rehabilitation of 7.5 to 8%.

Rifai owns and manages the 42nd Street Apartments near USF, 32-unit Oakwood Trace Apartments on Mason Street and a separate Orlando apartment development.

“My family and I relocated here a year ago from Canada and I've been selling off my Canadian pieces,” he says. “Prices in Canada got a little too high for my taste. As prices pick up here my interest has started to slack a little bit.”

Rifai says he is done investing for at least the next year.

Kattan describes the property as generally a B- asset: an older property in a good location.

“For a 1960s vintage property to trade at $55,000 per unit shows that we have recovered a significant amount of the lost value from the last commercial real estate downturn,” Kattan says in a press release.