The buyer of a $17 million apartment building on the city’s northside says he was defrauded by its developer, who misled him about Regis University’s long-term lease there.
Slipstream Properties, a small, Glendale-based developer of multifamily buildings, turned 4923 King St. into the 29-unit Vincent J. Boryla Apartments between 2016 and 2018, when the university signed a 10-year lease. Catamount Constructors handled construction.
The building’s namesake, Boryla, was a professional basketball player who won a gold medal in 1948 and later became general manager of the Denver Nuggets. He was a Regis University donor, and his son attended Regis High School before a professional football career.
In August 2023, the apartment building was bought for $17 million by MJM Real Estate Investments, a Tennessee company registered to a Robert Maxwell in Nashville. Soon after, MJM learned that not all was as it seemed, according to a lawsuit it filed April 25.
“MJM was alerted by Regis to the problems plaguing the premises,” that lawsuit recalls.
A boiler failure in the winter of 2021 was improperly fixed, causing further damage to the boilers, and an air conditioning problem before the sale wasn’t fixed at all, according to MJM.
“(Slipstream) and Regis had a pattern and practice in which Regis would defer maintenance, damaging the premises, and Slipstream would pay for the damage,” MJM claims.
That surprised MJM, which says it was told that the Regis lease was a triple net, requiring Regis to pay for maintenance, taxes and insurance coverage.
“In reality, Regis had borne little to no responsibility for maintaining the premises,” last month’s lawsuit states.
By the summer of 2024, the university was demanding reimbursement for $42,000 it had spent on repairs and warning MJM that five boilers would soon need to be replaced at a cost of $140,000, alongside $100,000 in cooling system fixes. Those expenses fell on MJM.
For that it blames Slipstream. The buyer says the local developer tricked it into thinking the lease with Regis was a triple net and that the 33,000-square-foot building was in good condition. It accuses Slipstream of common law fraud, breach of contract, and negligence.
“This is the first we’ve heard about this,” Peter Eklund, a partner at Slipstream, told BusinessDen. “We haven’t heard from the buyer until this. Other than that, we don’t have any comment.”
A spokeswoman and legal director for Regis, which is not accused of wrongdoing and is not a party to the case, declined to discuss the lawsuit or its lease along King Street.
MJM’s attorney is Leah Capritta with the Denver office of Holland & Knight.
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