A pair of adjacent apartment buildings totaling more than 500 units in Philadelphia's Poplar neighborhood have hit the market.
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The Darien has 212 apartments with average rents of $2,417, or $3.81 per SF. It was built from the ground up in 2024.
The Poplar was converted from a century-old warehouse to 302 apartments in 2021. Its rents average $2,640, or $3.12 per SF.
The older building also has 27K SF of office and commercial space, about one-third of which is leased, the PBJ reported. The newer building has 5,500 SF of retail, half of which is occupied by You Say Café.
Post Brothers CEO Michael Pestronk told the PBJ the developer put the buildings up for sale because Philadelphia's apartment market has "strongly recovered" after prior weakness.
The developer has displayed bullishness by advancing new projects, last week proposing a 241-unit building in Northern Liberties.
The latest quarterly data shows a tightening multifamily market in the area. Greater Philadelphia's apartment occupancy rose more than half a point last quarter to 96.7%, and rents jumped 2%, according to CBRE.
The top two submarkets in the region for apartment leasing last quarter were Center City and Northeast Philadelphia, with more than 2,000 units of net absorption combined, CBRE found. The buildings Post Brothers just put on the market sit near the border of those two areas.
While a series of apartment buildings traded in Center City in late 2025 and early 2026, regionwide investment sales volume has been down this year. CBRE reported that the first two quarters each recorded around $500M in sales volume, while the three previous quarters each surpassed $1.5B.
