Written by David Bracken | TRIANGLE NEWS & OBSERVER 

Another week. Another flurry of apartment deals in the Triangle.

Three complexes in Cary have sold in recent days for a total of just over $90 million.

The most noteworthy was the sale of the Preston Reserve apartments in Cary for $40.5 million, according to Wake County property records.

That price was $6.5 million more than the seller, Centennial Holding Co., a private Atlanta real estate firm, paid for the 360-unit complex in February 2010.

The buyer was a group of investors led by Greensboro-based Bell Partners.

The other two apartment deals involved Chancery Village at the Park in Cary and Boundary Village.

Chancery Village sold for $35.9 million, according to property records. The 276-unit complex opened last year. The buyer was Simpson Housing of Denver, which bought it from the developer, Woodfield Investments of Ashburn, Virginia.

Boundary Village, built in 1999, was purchased for $13.7 million by an LLC with a Raleigh address. The complex opened in 1999 and has 186 units.

The sales are further proof that investors strong appetite for multifamily properties is showing no signs of waning. The apartment market is one of the few commercial real estate sectors to bounce back quickly following the recession.

The turmoil in the single-family housing market, combined with the lack of new construction in recent years, is causing both occupancy and rental rates to rise in the Triangle and elsewhere.

The Triangle apartment market had an occupancy rate of 95.3 percent in the third quarter, up 1.8 percentage points from a year earlier, according to MPF Research, which analyzes apartment data in 64 U.S. metro markets.

The average monthly rent in the Triangle was $851, up 4.6 percent from the same period a year ago and up 3.1 percent from the previous quarter.

The quarterly increase was the largest seen in the Triangle in the two decades that MPF has been tracking the market, the firm reported.