TGM Completes $60M Luxury Apartment Buy

WORCESTER, MA-The sale of a luxury multifamily complex here for $60.5 million has endured the turbulent financial climate, as a private investment group from New York City continues its foray into New England’s apartment arena. After picking up residential communities in Portsmouth, NH, and Salem, MA, in 2007, TGM Associates has closed on Arborpoint at Plantation Ridge in Worcester, a 330-unit property aimed at the higher end of the Central Massachusetts rental market.

Set on 27 acres, Arborpoint at Pleasant Ridge was constructed by National Development of Newton and acquired by Heitman for $56.5 million in December 2004. “Obviously, we like it or we would not have bought it,” TGM president Thomas Gochberg tells GlobeSt.com in explaining the firm’s belief in the asset. That ardor helped the sales process escape a retrading or outright collapse experienced in other transactions since the investment market ground to an abrupt halt last autumn. The $183,000 per key paid for Plantation Ridge was virtually the same as that estimated in the Jan. 18 GlobeSt.com article that first reported TGM had the complex under agreement in a deal orchestrated by Apartment Realty Advisors.

Presently, Gochberg says he is generally upbeat about Greater Boston’s multifamily market. “I expect it will continue to be reasonably healthy,” he says, while acceding that the fallout from New York City’s Bear Stearns meltdown could creep into Boston’s critical financial services sector as well. TGM has nothing else in tow in New England, but Gochberg says his firm is willing to entertain opportunities as they come available. Having debt already in place has enabled TGM to steer clear of any slowdown in making investments that has dogged the high-leverage buyers who had driven pricing up in the past two years, explains Gochberg, whose firm has acquired 107 properties since its founding in 1991, of which about 50 have been harvested.