Bruce Toll: $25M for 247 Bucks apartments
Chesterfield changes hands
Bruce Toll: $25M for 247 Bucks apartments
Joseph N. DiStefano
Toll Bros. cofounder (and past Inquirer co-owner) Bruce E. Toll's BET Investments Inc. has paid $25 milllion to buy the Chesterfield Apartments complex, 1338 Veterans Highway, Levittown, from publicly traded Home Properties Inc., says BET president Michael P.Markman. The 247 apartments rent for around $1,100 and up. BET already owns the nearby Reedman Toll Car dealership in Langhorne, among other Lower Bucks County properties. How long can the apartment boom last, while office landlords like Brandywine Property Trust and BPG Properties have joined housing specialists in turning office-zoned sites into rental developments?
"We are interested in the long-term stability of the Philadelphia-area apartment market. The barriers to entry help protect stability of the apartments and allow us to grow the rents over time," Markman told me. "We feel that demand from renters will hold up over time. Of course, property values will fluctuate depending on how many active buyers are in the market." Plus it's a great time to finance deals, he added: "Today’s debt climate put us in a position to capture historically low interest rates by locking into sub-4% debt for the next 10 to 20 years."
