A 24-story luxury apartment tower in Buckhead is changing hands and changing its name, after ORIX Corporation secured an $83 million loan from New York Life to acquire AMLI Lenox, the 391-unit community at 3478 Lakeside Drive NE. The property is set to be rebranded Akari Buckhead, and it was 96 percent occupied at the time the financing closed.
The deal, first reported by ConnectCRE, saw AMLI Residential sell the tower, with CBRE's Debt & Structured Finance team, led by Robert LaChapelle and Blake Cohen, arranging the acquisition loan on ORIX's behalf. Per REBusinessOnline, LaChapelle and Cohen secured the loan through New York Life specifically on behalf of owner ORIX Corp. A separate CBRE Southeast multifamily team, made up of Shea Campbell, Ahish Cholia, Colleen Hendrix and Don Hoffman, represented AMLI Residential in the sale.
A Centerpiece of AMLI's Buckhead Campus
Completed in 2020, AMLI Lenox has long served as the anchor of AMLI's larger footprint in the neighborhood. The tower is the centerpiece of a 1,302-unit, four-property campus surrounding the 1.5-acre Marie Sims Park, the same report notes. Once rebranded, Akari Buckhead will continue to offer studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom floorplans and penthouses, along with onsite retail, management and maintenance services, according to REBusinessOnline's reporting.
The property's amenity list includes laundry services, a pet play area, a pet washing station and electric vehicle charging stations, per the same REBusinessOnline account. Those features sit inside a submarket where there's little room for a newcomer to compete: Buckhead had just 0.9% of its multifamily inventory under construction in the second quarter of 2026, according to a Matthews market report, while the neighborhood posted 2.7% year-over-year rent growth over that same stretch.
Tight Supply Driving Flight-to-Quality Demand
CBRE's own 2026 Atlanta outlook frames Buckhead as ground zero for a broader flight-to-quality trend, with the firm noting that vacancy in the neighborhood sits near 1% and that no meaningful new development is expected there through the end of the year. The same outlook points to second-quarter new leasing across Buckhead and prime suburban corridors climbing 11.2% year over year, a sign that well-located, well-amenitized towers like Akari Buckhead are positioned to hold their occupancy even as citywide conditions shift.
Those citywide numbers tell their own story. Atlanta's overall multifamily vacancy rate dropped to 5.86% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 6.45% in the first quarter, with the metro recording nearly 6,000 units of net absorption in that span, according to the Matthews report. A separate Northmarq analysis found Atlanta's construction pipeline had contracted to roughly 16,200 units underway by midyear, nearly 20% below the prior year's pace, even as investment volume rose 6% year over year to about $2.2 billion.
Part of a Busier Buckhead Investment Market
The AMLI Lenox financing lands amid a run of high-dollar activity in the neighborhood. Earlier this year, Hines Global Income Trust agreed to pay $237.8 million for the 312-unit 99 West Paces luxury complex, a separate Buckhead tower completed in 2023 and roughly 95% leased, according to ConnectCRE's reporting on that deal. That purchase was part of a larger three-property transaction totaling $525 million for the trust, which also included an industrial asset in Columbus, Ohio, and an apartment complex in Dallas.
Northmarq's year-end 2025 data underscores why investors keep circling Atlanta's apartment sector: net absorption exceeded 20,000 units over the trailing year, outpacing deliveries of just under 16,700 units, while full-year transaction volume rose 26% from 2024 and the median sale price reached $191,200 per unit. With construction starts slowing and Buckhead's supply pipeline essentially frozen, the newly rechristened Akari Buckhead enters its next chapter in one of the metro's most constrained — and most sought-after — submarkets.
