Madison hotel with chronic police calls reopens as a studio apartment building
- Wiseman Capital Team
- May 27
- 4 min read
The dilapidated Super 8 on Madison’s Far East Side is no more. Gutted and reassembled over the past year, the 37-year-old former motel is days away from reopening as a low-cost studio apartment building.
Wiseman Capital of Madison wanted the building’s units to look and feel like apartments, not motel rooms. So it stripped the 4765 Hayes Road structure down to the studs.
“The studs stayed,” said Cody Wiseman, the company’s founder and CEO. “The bones are good.”
Almost everything else is new, he said. Drywall. Windows. Doors. Plumbing. Wiring. And roofing, which was replaced in brown — matching the freshly installed brown-and-white siding — instead of the old green.
Now called Sandburg Studios, the building has 129 units varying in size from 277 to 340 square feet, available starting in June for between $975 and $1,125 per month with a 12-month lease. Shorter-term and month-to-month leases are available at higher rental rates. Some of the units are furnished.
It also has laundry on every floor, a fitness center, community space, bike storage, a dog run, a dog wash station and a pool that’s expected to open this summer.
The renovation was privately funded, Wiseman said, making it “naturally occurring affordable housing” that does not require residents to fall below a certain income threshold in order to qualify.
Wiseman is seeing interest, he said, from people who work in the area, students at Madison Area Technical College or those who travel frequently and want to be close to the Dane County Regional Airport. The units are also aimed at people looking for temporary housing, such as travel nurses.
Neighbors had concerns when his team first introduced the project, Wiseman said. The motel was in “really, really rough condition, with half the units or so probably not even livable,” he said. By 2023, when Wiseman Capital came in, the property had generated more than 100 police calls annually for several years in a row.
Discussions between neighbors, the development team and Ald. Sabrina Madison, who represents the area in the 17th District, showed that people wanted the renovation to include community space and other amenities, like the bike storage, Madison said at a preview event at the property on Thursday.
“This is a really great example of when neighbors say, ‘Hey, this is what we would like,’ [and] the developer comes in and produces it,” she said.
Though converting a hotel or motel into housing is familiar territory for many developers, Wiseman said, “I haven’t seen it done like this,” with nearly every element of the building reconceived for longer-term residents. Each studio has a full kitchen and bathroom and an open living area.
Wiseman initially expected to finish the renovation about a year earlier. The most significant delay, he said, came when he asked the Wisconsin Public Service Commission for an exception to a state law requiring multifamily housing projects — but not hotels and motels — to have individual electric meters in each unit. After state regulators denied a similar request by another housing developer, Wiseman opted to install the individual meters, despite the added cost.
“We found a way to make the numbers work,” he said.
Now, Wiseman said, he’s “seeing the vision come alive.” The property manager, Waunakee-based Patriot Properties, is giving several tours per day, and leases are being signed, he said. And he’s hearing from many prospective residents that the units, though small, are more spacious and less motel-like than they anticipated.
Comentários