A New York-based private equity real estate group has purchased a low-income Quinnipiac Meadows apartment complex for nearly $17.7 million.
According to the city’s online land records database, on June 30, Sunset Ridge Apartments LLC purchased 312 apartments spanning half a dozen buildings at 341 Smith Ave. for $17,691,928 from B\G Connecticut I LLC.
That property, known as the Sunset Ridge apartments complex, last sold in 2011 for $14 million. The city last appraised it for tax purposes as worth $24,508,200.
The new owner of the property is an affiliate of The Capital Realty Group from Spring Valley, N.Y., and is controlled by the investment company’s principal, Moshe Eichler. City land records show that the new owners have also taken over responsibilities for repaying a loan on the property to the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, a quasi-public agency that subsidizes affordable housing.
According to The Capital Realty Group’s website, the company is “a leading private equity real estate group focusing on the preservation, acquisition, redevelopment and management of affordable housing communities across the United States.” The site states that it was founded in 2004, and has been “involved in the acquisition, redevelopment and operation of over 17,130 affordable housing units in 27 states.”
The seller of the Sunset Ridge apartments complex is an affiliate of the Hamden-based real estate investment company Belfonti Companies, and is controlled by that company’s founder, president, and CEO, Michael Belfonti.
Representatives from The Capital Realty Group and Belfonti Companies did not return requests for comment by the publication time of this article.
Click here to read an Independent article from February about how Belfonti’s company filed 26 eviction lawsuits in just one month last December against Sunset Ridge tenants.
And click here, here, and here for articles in various Chicago news outlets from the spring of 2021 about tenant complaints of rats and mold at a 297-unit complex called Concordia Place on the far South Side of Chicago that was owned at the time by an affiliate of The Capital Realty Group. In 2022, The Capital Realty Group ultimately sold that complex for $100 million to an affiliate of the New York-based L+M Development Partners (which, coincidentally, is one of the co-developers of hundreds of new apartments coming soon to Science Park.)