TA Realty Pays $105M for Wellington Apartment Complex

TA Realty paid $105.5 million for Polo Lakes, a 366-unit apartment complex in Wellington, buying the property from J.P. Morgan Chase in its first trade since 2002. The deal closes out more than two decades of ownership by the bank’s real estate arm and hands a Boston institutional buyer a foothold well west of Palm Beach County’s coastline.

Why it matters

The trade is another sign that institutional capital is done waiting on the coast and is reaching into Palm Beach County’s western equestrian belt, where Wellington’s horse-country draw has held rents up without the land costs of West Palm Beach or Palm Beach Gardens. TA Realty already owns the 476-unit complex at 100 Portofino Drive in Palm Beach Gardens, which it repurchased for $193 million last October, so Polo Lakes is the firm’s second major Palm Beach County multifamily buy in under a year. Neither side has said whether renovations or rent repositioning are planned. Track more of the county’s institutional trades at the South Florida hub.

The numbers

The $105.5 million price works out to roughly $288,000 per unit across the 27 three-story buildings on the 19-acre site at 1950 Polo Lake Boulevard, just north of the Mall at Wellington Green. J.P. Morgan Chase bought the 530,918-square-foot property, built in 2000, for $47.4 million in 2002. The sale marks more than a doubling in value over that stretch, even before accounting for the two capital improvement cycles a garden-style complex typically sees in 24 years.

What’s next

J.P. Morgan Chase’s asset management arm declined to comment and TA Realty did not respond to requests for comment from the outlets that broke the sale, so neither side’s plans for the property are public yet. The bigger question is whether the trade pulls more institutional buyers toward Wellington and the rest of the western equestrian belt, where fewer large rental complexes have traded hands in the current cycle than along the coast.