Dive Brief:

• Apartment owner and manager Bell Partners has hired Mark Bates to be senior vice president of investments. He will lead the Greensboro, North Carolina-based company’s apartment investment activity in the Western U.S. region, including Seattle, the Bay Area, Southern California, Denver and Austin, Texas.
• Bates is familiar with the region through his 20 years at Seattle-based Holland Partner Group, which specializes in development, construction, acquisition, redevelopment and property management in California, Colorado, Washington and Oregon.
• Bates most recently served as executive managing director of investment management at Holland. Before then, he was the company’s CFO and vice president of finance and corporate accounting after beginning his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Dive Insight:

Although Western markets were hard hit by the pandemic, Bell CEO Lili Dunn identified them as potential targets for the company in an interview earlier this year with Multifamily Dive. Specifically, she pointed to urban areas in metros like Denver and San Francisco.

“To be a little contrarian, we’re also looking at quality assets in some urban micro-locations that have access to deep employment drivers and transportation hubs, particularly with rising gas prices,” Dunn said. “We’re seeing a rebound there and I think there could be some more interesting buying opportunities since the cash flow has been a little bit depressed.”

Bates will be based in the company’s San Francisco office, where he will report to Nickolay Bochilo, Bell’s executive vice president of investments. The company’s most recent acquisition in the West was Bell South City — a 260-unit community in South San Francisco that it acquired from San Mateo, California-based Sares Regis Group of Northern California in May.

“As Bell Partners continues to deepen our footprint in our target Western U.S. markets, Mark will play an integral role in identifying investment opportunities that align with our strategy and continue our track record of outperformance for our investors,” Bochilo said in a press release. 

Bell invests in 14 markets across the country and now has more than 70,000 units under management. In the 2022 National Multifamily Housing Council Top 50, it ranked as the No. 18 apartment manager.

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