Chilton Hall Apartments in Elizabeth — Courtesy: Gebroe-Hammer Associates
By Joshua Burd
The longtime owner of a 126-unit garden apartment complex in downtown Elizabeth has sold the property, in a newly announced deal by Gebroe-Hammer Associates.
Stephen Tragash, an executive vice president with the brokerage firm, represented the seller in its trade of Chilton Hall Apartments on Chilton Street. He also procured the buyer, a longtime client, noting that the deal follows 40 years of generational ownership.
Terms were not disclosed.
“Longtime ownership dispositions are pretty unique and stand out even more when they are as well maintained as Chilton Hall,” Tragash said. “Generally speaking, pre-1970s-era multifamily product across the Union County submarket has a 97+ percent occupancy rate. For this reason, investment demand for quality, existing product is still outpacing supply of for-sale multifamily properties. This is even more pronounced across high-population-density transit centers like Elizabeth.”
Made up of 21 buildings on roughly four acres, Chilton Hall Apartments includes 60 one-bedroom and 66 two-bedroom floorplans, Gebroe-Hammer said. It is steps from six NJ Transit bus routes and less than a half-mile from the agency’s Elizabeth station, offering North Jersey Coast Line service, while Union County College is two blocks away and Kean University is 1.4 miles from the property.
Residents also have easy access to local, regional and interstate highways including the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, Interstate 78 and many others.
Gebroe-Hammer, meantime, noted that more than 2,770 market-rate rental units are expected to come online across the Union County submarket within the next 18 months.
“Not only does this register about 12 percent of the new construction being introduced to northern New Jersey, it also bodes well for existing apartment buildings, which are poised for repositioning to appeal to today’s ever-growing tenant cohort of young professionals and managers,” said Tragash, the Union County and Elizabeth market specialist for the Livingston-based brokerage firm.
