MCZ Development gets $54M from architect FitzGerald for North Side apartments
155-unit property is redevelopment of former hospital
Chicago’s MCZ Development turned a former Andersonville hospital into a $53.5 million luxury apartment sale.
The firm sold the 155-unit Anderson Point at 5700 North Ashland Avenue in the North Side neighborhood to Chicago-based Lake Street Lofts LLC, which is managed by area architect Patrick FitzGerald, according to Illinois business records. Kiser Group’s Lee Kiser, Katie LeGrand and Jacob Price brokered the deal.
“Apartment properties in the neighborhood are almost entirely vintage 3-story walk-up buildings with few or no amenities,” Kiser said in a statement. “Anderson Point caters to an upscale tenant who previously would not have been able to find luxury apartments with full-scale amenities in Andersonville.”
Anderson Point is a redevelopment of the former Edgewater Medical Center and has studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments.
It’s not clear how much MCZ profited from the sale, which was a 1031 exchange transaction that allows capital gains taxes on real estate investments to be deferred when the cash from a sale is put directly into buying a separate, similar property. FitzGerald’s LLC likely placed the capital into the Andersonville asset from its $49 million sale last month of a Fulton Market lofts apartment building at 910 West Lake Street to Alex Najem and Shanna Khan.
Najem’s Fulton Street Cos. is incorporating that parcel into a larger redevelopment of adjacent property into a 530,000-square-foot office project set to be anchored by a lease with Harrison Street Real Estate Capital for about 150,000 square feet.
MCZ in 2019 received a $26.7 million construction loan from Heartland Bank & Trust for the adaptive reuse project on the Andersonville property, which it first proposed in 2015, The Real Deal previously reported. Neither the firm nor FitzGerald returned requests for comment.
The Andersonville project marked a large addition of rental units to the North Side amid a slowdown in multifamily construction completions in the Chicago area last year. Deliveries fell to below 6,000 units across 32 properties in 2022 from almost 11,000 units in 2019, according to a January report from Yardi Matrix.
Founded by Michael Lerner in 1985, MCZ’s portfolio also includes a redevelopment of a 1920s-era dairy plant site into a condo building in Ukrainian Village and a Fulton Market complex the firm co-developed with @properties co-founder Michael Golden.