Entrance to Hilltop Club Apartments office on Thoroughbred Drive near Campbell Lane.

Plans to rehabilitate Hilltop Club Apartments on Thoroughbred Drive near Campbell Lane will move forward, but with a new owner.

The 218-unit apartment complex, beset by dwindling occupancy and a rising crime rate in recent years, has been purchased by Nashville-based real estate investment and management firm Freeman Webb Co., which plans a similar rehab to one proposed by the previous owner earlier this year.

Freeman Webb purchased the complex for $18.3 million, according to a news release. A development plan amendment for the property, approved in January by the City-County Planning Commission of Warren County, listed San Diego-based PEP-WKU LLC as the property owner and Capstone Real Estate Investments of Birmingham, Ala., as the developer.

“We bought it from them,” Freeman Webb Executive Vice President Bob Freeman said. “We have a similar plan, transitioning from student housing to traditional housing.”

Constructed in 2005, the Hilltop Club complex includes nine three-story buildings on 19.7 acres. The community currently offers three- and four-bedroom units and is operated as student housing for Western Kentucky University students.

“We have significant renovation plans for Hilltop Club that include increasing the unit count to 326 by converting the four-bedroom floor plans into two separate units,” said Freeman, a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives. “We will also be repositioning the property as a conventional apartment complex to better meet the increasing housing needs of Kentucky’s fastest-growing city.”

That’s in line with the plan presented by Capstone Executive Vice President Christopher Mouron in January. It called for reducing the number of beds from 761 to about 587 while increasing the number of units from 218 to 362.

“We want to re-position the Hilltop Club into a modern, vibrant community that appeals to a variety of renters,” Mouron said in January.

The plan was approved unanimously by the planning commission, which no doubt welcomed the revitalization of a property that has seen shootings, break-ins and other crimes rise as occupancy plummeted in recent years.

Capstone acknowledged the property’s problems and presented its proposed solution in a letter accompanying its development plan application.

“The original development was successful for a time but started to see a decline in occupancy when more purpose-built student housing properties were added to the market,” the letter said. “The newer and often better-located properties created competition that Hilltop Club has struggled to overcome.”

The result is a dismal current occupancy rate of about 40% that has led to lower rents and relaxed application screening, the Capstone letter said.

Mouron called Capstone’s plan “an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade,” but now that transformation will have to be handled by Freeman Webb.

Freeman said the 42-year-old company is up to the task.

“We do all of it, from construction to legal and property management,” Freeman said. “This is a dream project for us. It will utilize every single person in our group.”

Freeman Webb already manages some properties in Kentucky, but this will allow it to enter the Bluegrass State as a property owner for the first time.

“This is the first Kentucky project we’ll own,” Freeman said. “We’ve been trying to get into the Kentucky market for a while. We are excited to expand our presence in Kentucky and become part of the Bowling Green community. This is a city that is experiencing tremendous growth and we believe it will continue to prosper.”

Freeman said his company’s development plan for the Hilltop Club doesn’t exclude WKU students but does present a product he thinks will be more appealing.

“Even if we continue getting students, there is a desire today for more one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments,” he said. “It will be a little bit nicer product.

“We’re re-positioning this property. What happened in the past is in the past.”

Freeman expects work on the property to begin immediately and be completed in less than a year.

The Hilltop Club will add to a large Freeman Webb portfolio. The company owns or manages more than 16 million square feet of multifamily, office and retail space. It has a total portfolio of about 15,500 multifamily units across 101 communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Alabama.