Playhouse Square to put its downtown Cleveland luxury apartment building The Lumen up for

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Playhouse Square plans to list its downtown Cleveland luxury apartment high-rise, The Lumen, for sale, less than two years after its completion.

The 34-story, 318-apartment building at Euclid Avenue and East 17th Street, across the street from three of the arts district’s venues, should hit the market “any day now,” Matthew Lawton, an executive managing director for the Jones Lang LaSalle Capital Markets brokerage firm marketing it, wrote in an email.

The building is expected to be listed at about $500,000 a unit, which would put it at around $159 million, according to a news release from the firm.

Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reached out to the nonprofit’s spokeswoman to find out why officials with the Playhouse Square nonprofit chose to sell the building now.

Lawton said that the building is more than 90% leased.

Construction started in April 2018 and work was finished near the end of 2020 on the $135 million project, which also includes a 530-space parking garage for tenants and the public. Playhouse Square, which developed it along with the Hines firm of Houston, touted it as the largest residential project in downtown Cleveland in four decades.

At 396 feet, it is the 11th tallest building in Cleveland. Rents range from about $1,500 and top out at more than $7,000.

The project’s finances included tax-exempt bonds, a $15 million gift from the Richard J. Fasenmyer Foundation and a $10 million loan from Cuyahoga County.

Its opening came amid uncertainty about the downtown residential market. That year, state health officials had required nonessential businesses to close and forbade dining in restaurants because of the coronavirus. The orders hollowed out office buildings and downtown as a whole during the pandemic’s early months.

But a report from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance showed that 89.4% of all apartments in the central business district were rented between July and September of last year, compared with 84.3% in the same months in 2020.

Read more:

Apartment construction in Cleveland lags in 2021, though analysts predict big numbers next year

Playhouse Square president, CEO Gina Vernaci sets stage to retire in 2023

Construction completed on The Lumen at Playhouse Square, adding another tower to Cleveland skyline