Located in the well-traveled Montgomery County area off the Washington DC Beltway and Route 1, Seven Springs sits on 33 acres on Cherry Hill Road and consists of three mid-rise structures and several garden-style apartments. The complex, which accounts for a total of 750,000 sf, also offers retail space, as well as a community meeting building. Developers, a prominent Maryland family, built the complex in the 1960's. LaValle acquired the apartments in 1986 from John Hancock, according to county records.

Structuring the transaction between the seller and the joint venture was no simple task for several reasons. "It was extremely hard given the size of the deal," Ideal Realty's Tim Sabet explains to GlobeSt.com. "It's hard for equity people to put up that amount of money. But in the end, equity was the easy part; the hard part was getting the loan approved. We also ran into some difficulties with terrorism insurance."

Ultimately, the buyer had to pay an additional $200 per unit over the previous rate for the terrorism coverage. Commenting on the high price the complex commanded, Sabet notes that Seven Springs is in a tight market. "The two tightest markets in the Washington Metro area are College Park and Silver Spring because there's not a lot of land for development," he says. "College Park is so close to DC, so close to Baltimore and near the University of Maryland, so there's a lot of demand."