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12 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | AGUST 23, 2021 By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com R esidents at the new 160- unit Cromwell apartment complex dubbed The Landon will have access to an upscale fitness center, coworking space and a dog spa, in addition to other perks. About 5,000 square feet of the complex is dedicated to such amenities. Up to about a decade ago a building with all those bells and whistles outside a major city would likely be an outlier, said Michael Belfonti, CEO of Hamden-based Belfonti Cos., which developed the Landon. But today, such features are necessary to compete for tenants. "In the old days, if people could buy, they would never rent — rent was thought of as a second alternative," Belfonti said. "That's not the case anymore." In an effort to serve a combination of empty nesters and well-healed Millennials who are renting apartments instead of buying houses, Belfonti and other developers with projects in Greater Hartford say that highly-amenitized buildings are becoming their default. And as many white-collar workers shift to a hybrid work setup in which they spend more time at home, features that once seemed opulent are becoming necessary to attract such tenants. The trend of developers including more amenities in new residential buildings predates COVID-19 and the resulting work-from-home arrangements. A study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found renters with a household income of at least $75,000 accounted for three-quarters of the growth in U.S. renters between 2010 and 2018, a period during which apartment dwellers grew by 3.2 million. Hartford-based developer Marty Kenny said that for about a decade developers seemed to be trying to outdo each other by including increasingly extravagant features to buildings and complexes geared toward young professionals and empty nesters. "The amenities thing for a while was like a nuclear arms race," said Kenny, president of Lexington Partners LLC. "Some of it's silly, like do I really need a rock climbing wall in my building?" But the market appears to have reached a new normal in which market-rate apartment developments cannot, for example, simply stick a treadmill and dumbbells in an open area to serve as a gym, and still be competitive. Fitness centers with state-of-the-art equipment and common areas for socializing are must-haves for new complexes, Kenny said. In June 2020, tenants started moving into The Borden, a $32-million apartment complex Lexington Partners developed on the Silas Deane Highway in Wethersfield. The five-story, 111-unit building Luxury Lifestyle With apartment boom still raging, Greater Hartford developers focus on amenities to lure tenants Marty Kenny Developer Michael Belfonti inside his soon-to-debut Cromwell luxury apartment complex called "The Landon." PHOTO CREDIT | STEVE LASCHEVER