A San Diego real estate firm has paid $20 million for Sand City’s Independent building.

A San Diego real estate tech firm has purchased The Independent luxury rental building in Sand City, paying $20 million in a bet on the Monterey Peninsula real estate market.

Diversyfund – an online real estate platform that crowdfunds money from individual investors and uses it to purchase apartment buildings across the U.S. – acquired the property at 600 Ortiz Ave., it announced March 24.

The seller, Urban Atelier LLC, is partially owned by Gerald Lyles and the family of late developer Don Orosco, who died in 2020. (Orosco and Lyles also teamed up to develop the city’s South of Tioga project.)

The four-story building houses 61 apartments – a mix of studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments – and “stands alone in the [Monterey Bay] region as the only 50-plus unit project built here since the 1980s,” according to Cushman & Wakefield managing director Scott MacDonald, whose team brokered the transaction.

The property also has more than 12,600 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, 11,000 square feet of which currently sits vacant. The rest of that space is currently occupied by craft beer house Post No Bills.

Alan Lewis, Diversyfund’s co-founder and chief investment officer, tells the Weekly that more than 95 percent of The Independent’s units are already leased, and that the firm was “really attracted by the fact that there isn’t a lot of newer [housing] product available in the [Monterey Bay] market.”

Diversyfund’s press release on its acquisition claimed the Monterey Bay area has “experienced an influx of new residents looking to escape the economic and political upheaval of larger coastal cities.”