Luxury-condo project in Scottsdale sold to New Jersey firm

A stalled luxury-condo project funded by investors in the now-defunct Mortgages Ltd. has been sold to a New Jersey-based real-estate firm for $19.5 million, a broker involved in the deal said Monday.

The project, called Ten Wine Lofts, is an 82-unit, multifamily residential complex near Scottsdale and Osborne roads in Scottsdale that was about 95 percent completed when construction was halted in 2008.

The seller was ML Manager LLC, the company created by Mortgages Ltd. investors after the Scottsdale-based commercial lender's June 2008 bankruptcy to dispose of remaining real-estate assets.

Ten Wine Lofts' buyer was Connell Real Estate & Development Co., of Berkeley Heights, N.J., which intends to complete construction on the project and then rent out the units as apartments, according to Phoenix-based real-estate broker Ric Holway, of commercial real-estate firm Hendricks & Partners, which represented both buyer and seller.

Holway said Ten Wine Lofts, 7126 E. Osborn Road, originally was valued at $44 million.

The sale price announced Monday of about $237,800 per unit was among the highest for any recent sale of its type, he added.

The project was ML Manager's second-most highly valued asset after Centerpoint Condominiums, which sold in September for $30 million to the Zaremba Group, a real-estate firm based in Cleveland.

Other recent ML Manager sales include a $1.9 million deal in October that included the 42-unit Belleview Estates apartment community and two adjacent lots at 4525 E. Belleview St. in Phoenix.

Mortgages Ltd., at one time the state's largest private commercial real-estate lender, filed for bankruptcy in June 2008, shortly after the reported suicide of its then-CEO, Scott Coles.

by J. Craig Anderson The Arizona Republic Nov. 2, 2010 12:00 AM



Luxury-condo project in Scottsdale sold to New Jersey firm