NASHVILLE, TN—Pollack Shores Real Estate Group has made a tidy profit off a vacant multifamily project. Pollack Shores just sold Velocity in the Gulch to an affiliate of Walton Street Capital of Chicago for $37.5 million.

Pollack Shores, a real estate investment and services form focused on multifamily and mixed-use properties, acquired the 220 apartments it owned in the development in March 2011 for $25.3 million. The firm converted the unsold condo units to for-rent apartments before putting the multifamily assets back on the market. The sale does not include the 43 condo units in the building or the ground-level retail.

“The profit we made was commensurate with the risk we took of buying an empty building,” Steven Shores, president of Pollack Shores, tells GlobeSt.com. At more than $170,000 per unit, the disposition represents one of the highest sales prices, on a per-unit  basis, ever achieved in the Nashville multifamily market.

Shores says acquiring the asset was the most challenging aspect of the deal. He described the transaction as “very complicated” on the front end, taking months to close and plenty of patience on all sides.

Located at 320 11th Avenue South, Velocity opened in 2009 as a condominium building. The lender took back the property through a deed in lieu of foreclosure the next year. The Velocity deal was so successful that Pollack Shores is hunting for similar deals in the Southeast U.S.

“We continue to look for opportunities to acquire fractured condominium communities,” Shores says. “Velocity was our second one and we have looked at a number since. In addition, we are actively buying value add apartment communities and we are currently developing some 1500-plus units.”