The Four Seasons manufactured home community in Anchorage, Alaska, listed on Weidner Apartment Homes’ website.
“They’re the 800-pound gorilla in town,” Kim Johnson, a real estate agent with Paragon Properties Inc., said in a phone interview.
Bloomberg News tells MHProNews that the 4,000 apartments are a fraction of the more than 38,000 units the company owns in Seattle, Phoenix, Colorado, Texas, Canada’s Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces, and other markets. Together, the properties have a net asset value of $2.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making the company’s 72-year-old founder W. Dean Weidner a billionaire.
Dan Benton, an Anchorage real estate agent, said in a phone interview, “They suck up all the big stuff that my other clients would like to buy, usually in a private sale before it hits the market.” In addition to the properties Weidner owns in Alaska, his Kirkland, Washington-based company now owns at least 40 buildings with more than 6,100 units in Seattle and surrounding towns such as Bellevue, Kirkland, Renton and Everett, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Rents in Seattle are up 6.4 percent over last year as of January, data compiled by real estate website Trulia Inc. shows.
“They recognize the opportunity in small markets,” said Gary Klockenteger, senior vice-president of valuation advisory at Kidder Mathews in Seattle.
The company invests $400 million annually, adding 4,000 units a year, and Weidner reviews 20 to 30 purchase opportunities with his acquisitions team a week, according to an official university write-up of a conversation at Wisconsin-Stout. Weidner Investment Services is the 30th-largest owner of rental properties in the U.S, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council.
Weidner owns more than 30 properties in Arizona, with at least 9,900 units, valued at about $1 billion before accounting for debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Half are in Phoenix, where rents are up 10 percent year-over-year, according to Trulia. Others are located in Tucson, Anthem, Mesa, Chandler and Peoria, according to the website. Most of the Arizona properties were purchased in 2010 or later.
The company owns at least 18 properties with more than 2,900 units in Midland and Odessa, Texas, towns west of Dallas in the oil-rich Permian Basin region, where the number of operating drilling rigs has dropped with oil prices, according to Bloomberg Intelligence reports.
“In Midland, Texas, Weidner is a big player,” said Scott L. Williams, whose Scott Williams Team Realtors owns about 350 apartment units in the area.
In Colorado Springs, where the company owns at least 18 buildings with about 2,600 units, oil also has played a role: the city’s 93 percent occupancy rate is weaker than other markets Weidner operates in.
Weidner has also purchased properties in Minnesota, Utah and in cities surrounding Los Angeles.
“They look for opportunity that most people would pass right by,” Klockenteger said.
Weidner’s mother began teaching him how to maintain and manage his family’s duplex and fourplex apartments in Colorado Springs when he was 14 years old, according to a 2002 profile in Alaska Business Monthly. He continued to manage them through college, according to the article.
He bought his first property in Seattle in 1977, Weidner said in an October 2013 talk at University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he donated $1 million to the business school. ##
(Photo Credit: Bloomberg News)
