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Roaring into the Giants rankings on the strength of its second full year of operations, this Foster City, Calif.-based multifamily builder shows the power of the apartment sector by landing at No. 56, completing 1,463 rental units in 2001 with a market value of $297.5 million.
When C. Preston Butcher decided to pull his group out of Lincoln Property’s Western region in 1999, he targeted a niche of building apartments and mixed-use projects on infill sites near employment centers in the San Francisco Bay area and other Western cities.
Rob Calleja, a finance project manager, says one of that niche’s major attractions is limited competition because the barriers to entry are so high. “The sites are hard to get, expensive, and entitlement takes years, but some of our new projects are renting for well over $2 a square foot,” he says. “It’s often said we target renters-by-choice, but that’s a simplification. People rent from us because they want the location, and there’s often no other choice available.”
Legacy pulls investment capital from domestic real estate investment trusts and insurance companies. With suburban apartment markets nearing saturation in many cities, those big institutional investors find Legacy’s high-density infill niche attractive.
Legacy at Museum Park in downtown San Jose, Calif., is a typical project — 117 luxury rental units in a combination of flats, townhouses and live/work lofts, with private entries, spiral staircases and high ceilings.
| Legacy at Westwood in West Los Angeles was completed last May. The six-story concrete building has 187 rental apartments, built at 100 units per acre. |
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