A word to the wise; most of the food trucks on Temple’s campus shut down during winter break. Of course, this makes sense, as profitability tends to plummet when your entire customer base disappears. But it’s been a minute since we’ve been in college, so the whole winter break thing didn’t even enter our mind as we trekked up to Temple to grab lunch earlier this week. Alas, we came up empty on the lunch front. But the trip wasn’t for naught, as we noticed some ‘For Sale’ signs posted at the northwest corner of 12th & Diamond.

This property sits on the northern edge of Temple’s campus, and has a university-affiliated parking lot across the street to the south, as well as the rear of the Tyler School of Art building. To the north, east, and west, however, are homes, mostly of the two-story variety. These homes are clearly not Philadelphia-style row homes, and from looking at property records and the architecture, we believe they were constructed in the 1970s.

But back to the development opportunity at hand. There are five vacant parcels at the northwest corner of 12th & Diamond which together cover a little over 20K sqft of space. By right, a developer could build 14 single-family homes here. But let’s be real, nobody is buying a property at this address with a plan to construct single-family homes. As we said, Temple is across the street, and student housing is the booming business in these parts. So anyone that’s considering purchasing this property is surely doing so with the intention of building a big apartment building, or perhaps a row of multi-unit buildings.

And that brings us to the fly in the ointment for this particular opportunity, the $3.9M asking price. We aren’t sure that any of the projects we just described make sense at that number, but a student housing approach is the only one that would have a shot at working from a financial perspective. But that would require a variance from the ZBA, and we’re hard pressed to identify the hardship in this case, nor do we believe the community would lend their support. So it’s back to a by-right play, which would reduce the expected purchase price considerably. We’d think the owners will simply hold out for a higher price at some point in the future, but if you’re interested in building some homes near Temple, we encourage you to reach out and make ’em an offer. The worst thing they can do is say no.