BELMONT, MASS. — The Hamilton Co., a privately held real estate investment and management firm based in Boston, has acquired Hill Estates, a 396-unit apartment community in Belmont. The original developer, the DiGiovanni family, sold the market-rate community for $175 million.
Built by the DiGiovanni brothers — Silvio, Rocco, Joseph and Charles — in the 1960s, Hill Estates had been owned and managed by the family since its inception and hit the market for the first time as part of this transaction.
Simon Butler, Biria St. John, John McLaughlin and Brian Bowler of CBRE represented the DiGiovanni family and procured The Hamilton Co. in the transaction. KeyBank Real Estate Capital provided an undisclosed amount of acquisition financing.
“For over 50 years, the DiGiovanni family had been great stewards of this legacy asset in one of the most desirable towns in the Boston metro,” says St. John. “While the DiGiovanni family has taken great care and pride in this asset, we anticipate that The Hamilton Co. will make substantial investments in the asset to modernize and amenitize the community.”
Hill Estates is situated on a 14.7-acre site off Brighton Street in Belmont, which is located on the western border of Cambridge, Mass., and about nine miles northwest of downtown Boston. The property offers a mix of townhomes and elevatored midrise buildings, with most apartments offering individual forced air heating and cooling systems, and the two-bedroom flats offering two baths. The community also features 92 townhomes with basements (1,417 square feet) and 304 flats (997 square feet on average) that are larger than typical new construction, according to CBRE.
Included in the sale as part of the main campus at Hill Estates was 55 Brighton Street, a mixed-use building with 2,600 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and five newly constructed one-bedroom apartments above. Also included was 4 Hill Road, a three-story, 5,463-square-foot office building.
Also part of the sale were two offsite commercial office buildings: 26 Brighton Street and 90 Concord Avenue. The office properties are located a few blocks away from the main campus and total approximately 16,000 square feet.
The Hamilton Co. plans to market and sell the offsite commercial buildings in the near future and renovate all unit interiors at Hill Estates. The company will have an onsite management team and offer its full suite of online services, including rent payments, maintenance requests and renter’s insurance.
The acquisition increases The Hamilton Co.’s metro Boston holdings to nearly 6,000 apartments, according to Jameson Brown, the company’s chairman and CEO.
— John Nelson