Becovic Residential pays $20 million for 1923 Andersonville mixed-use block

Becovic Residential has paid $20 million for the 1923 mixed-use building at 5154 N. Clark Street in Andersonville, a full city block where Clark Street, Foster Avenue and Ashland Avenue meet. The seller had held it for more than 40 years, placing the original basis somewhere before 1986, and the $20 million prices what Andersonville became across at least two property cycles.

Essex Realty Group brokered the transaction, and Associated Bank provided the financing, with Elizabeth Hozian handling that relationship. The building holds 81 apartments and ten ground-floor commercial spaces, now renamed The Quarters at Andersonville; divided across the apartments alone, the $20 million prices at roughly $247,000 a door, with the storefronts swept into the same check. Becovic Management Group, the affiliated management arm, will operate the property, and Sal Becovic, the company's president, describes the acquisition, its first in Andersonville, as a natural extension of the North Side footprint the firm already operates.

The report does not contain what the seller originally paid, nor the price per square foot, the occupancy, or the capitalization rate the price implies. It does establish that a 103-year-old building changed hands with no construction cost attached, which is the argument PWD has made as new starts stall: the squeeze on development economics favors owners of assets that already exist, and a full-block apartment building from 1923 becomes more valuable when new supply stalls.

Associated Bank is a familiar name in these pages. In August the bank made a $9 million Ohio retail construction loan whose logic was relationship depth, the 18th loan between Associated Bank and that sponsor; here the same lender is financing an operating building, so the exposure sits on income the asset already generates rather than on a draw schedule for a project still to be built.

The report does not say whether Becovic intends to hold The Quarters as a rental for the long haul or reposition it, and it offers no renovation program or capital budget to read. No occupancy, no rents and no leasing plans are given for the ten street-level spaces on a block that fronts three streets; whether those bays are income to keep as is or the first thing a new owner changes is the part of the deal the coverage does not answer.