JACKSONVILLE, FL—Although South Florida is a hot spot for multifamily, Jacksonville multifamily is also seeing some action. Palatine Capital Partners just bought Villas at Dames Point Crossing multifamily complex for $14.02 million. That equals $77,889 per unit and $66.76 per square foot.

That’s well below replacement cost for the newly-constructed multifamily property. Built in two phases, Villas at Dames Point Crossing has 180 units. One hundred twenty units were completed in 2006 and another 60 units, initially built as condominiums, came online in 2007.

John Stone, principal and managing director of Multi-Family Housing for Colliers International Tampa Bay, along with CEO Robert Selton and senior associate Douglas Blair, with Colliers International Northeast Florida, represented the seller, Dames Point. Brad Coe of Horizon Realty Management, represented Palatine. There were 56 interested buyers and seven offers on the multifamily asset.

“Our strategy was to maximize the exposure of the property and personally contact the active multifamily buyers in the northeast Florida area,” Stone said in a statement. “We chose Palatine Capital Partners for its familiarity with the Jacksonville market and commitment to the area.”

Brian Moulder, senior vice president of Multi-Housing for CBRE in North Florida, tells GlobeSt.com Jacksonville sees a healthy number of mutlfamily trades in respect to the number of units in the market. Jacksonville is home to about 65,000 multifamily units.

“The number one challenge that we need to overcome is getting people down from a 30,000-foot level to the actual asset,” Moulder says. “Jacksonville has bi-furcated submarket to submarket in multifamily. On a national perspective it usually sits in the bottom in some of the reports. But when you have a couple of bad apples in a couple of these submarkets, it paints a broad brush over the multifamily market.”