An apartment developer has paid $4.5 million for the United Church of Christ’s longtime headquarters, a downtown Cleveland office building that is set to become housing.

K&D Group closed the deal on Tuesday, May 31. The transaction does not yet appear in Cuyahoga County property records. But the church disclosed the price in a newsletter posted on its website.

The nine-story building, located at 700 Prospect Ave., served as the organization’s national base for more than three decades. K&D plans to transform the property, which sits in a National Historic District, into approximately 130 apartments and commercial space on the ground floor.

The church, meanwhile, does not move far. After years of deliberation, executives last year signed a lease on a much smaller space in the AECOM Center office building on East Ninth Street. The move is scheduled for July.

After expenses, proceeds from the sale of the building will go into the church’s endowment to support its mission. The denomination has nearly 800,000 members nationwide.

“As we seek to position our organization for future success, we seek to invest more resources in mission and people and fewer resources in ownership,” said Reverend John Dorhauer, General Minister and President of the church, in a press release.

“The 700 Prospect has been a great asset to us for over 30 years,” he said, “but new technologies allow us to work differently in less space, reducing both our expenses and our carbon footprint. We look forward to moving into a new space that will better equip us for 21st century success.”

The building, listed with real estate brokerage Newmark in July, had an asking price of $7 million. The final price, at two-thirds of that figure, reflects that the property is a redevelopment game.

“There is no market for commercial offices at this time,” Dorhauer said in the post on the church’s website.

K&D expects most apartments to be modest one-bedroom units, around 550 square feet. This means that the units will be relatively affordable for downtown.

To help fund the project, the Willoughby-based developer plans to apply for federal and state historic preservation tax credits. Construction isn’t expected to begin until late 2023, CEO Doug Price told Crain’s in April.

“It’s a few years from now,” he said at the time. “We have to apply for the credits, and with the current construction costs and the lack of suppliers and all the other issues, we’ll probably sit on the building.”

Historically, K&D prefers to complete a downtown project before starting another. The company is halfway through a partial residential conversion of 55 Public Square, an office tower where the first apartments will open in September.

This project is expected to be completed by mid-2023.

The Prospect Avenue Building’s selling points included its location, within walking distance of attractions such as East Fourth Street, Progressive Field and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Richard Sheehan, chief executive of Newmark, said in a press release.

“The property is well-suited for multi-family conversion,” said Sheehan, who handled the listing with colleague Terry Coyne, vice president of Newmark’s Cleveland office.