New York City developer DMG Investments has completed its $27 million project to turn the partially constructed but abandoned hotel project on Sweet Home Road into Air Buffalo, a multicolored apartment building with 154 residential units adjacent to University at Buffalo’s North Campus.

The six-story building features a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. And it’s already fully leased.

The project received $3.5 million in tax breaks from the Amherst Industrial Development Agency.

“We’re so proud of the finished product at Air Buffalo,” said DMG Investments founder and CEO Jacky He. “We have remained committed to providing an excellent community for our residents.”

Amherst officials are relieved as well. “It’s wonderful to have outside investors come into the area, recognize that, and make substantial investments in our area, especially on a property that was an eyesore for a very long time in this town,” said A.J. Baynes, president and CEO of the Amherst Chamber of Commerce.

“We are so excited to not have to refer to it by its former name, that I will not say,” agreed Deputy Town Supervisor Jacqueline Berger.

Located at 1265 Sweet Home, just north of Maple Road, the building features 44 studio, 87 one-bedroom and 23 two-bedroom units.

Rents range from $1,349 for studios, to $1,479 to $1,579 for one-bedroom units, to as much as $1,999 to $2,129 for two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments. The units can be either furnished or unfurnished.

The building also offers amenities that include an indoor pool, jacuzzi, saunas, fitness center, fire pits, a resident lounge, private onsite parking with 13 electric-vehicle charging stations and a “smart package” room.

“A lot of those amenities were originally envisioned as being part of the hotel. So when we pivoted to multifamily residential, we were able to keep those amenities available,” said Cian R. Hamill, DMG’s vice president of acquisitions and development. “So if you like the idea of living in a hotel, you’ll love living in Air Buffalo.”

Air Buffalo is the second project DMG has completed in Amherst, after it built and opened its Auden Buffalo student housing complex on North Forest Road. Auden is DMG’s student-housing brand.

Both properties are operated and managed by Austin, Texas-based Campus Life & Style or its affiliate, CLS Residential, which handles DMG’s properties. “We’re very happy to be part of the community,” said Jessica Nix, chief marketing officer for Campus Life and CLS Residential. “We have found we’ve been very successful with our lease-up with young professionals and we are seeing a lot of students from the University at Buffalo.”

It’s also the first project to be completed under DMG’s new “Air” brand for multifamily apartment housing, although the real estate developer has completed other student and multifamily housing projects up and down the East Coast and in the Midwest. It now has $1.2 billion in finished or pending buildings in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin and South Carolina, with potential projects in Florida and Massachusetts.

“This is our second completed asset in the Town of Amherst, so we feel very strongly about our investments in the town,” Hamill said. “The town has been a great partner with us from the beginning.”

With its windows and exterior panels of white, blue-gray and red faux wood, the finished product is a far cry from the building shell that stood on the site four years ago, essentially abandoned and surrounded by fencing.

After a dozen years trying to open a hotel on a site they had purchased in 2007, two brothers from Ontario had again come up short on financing. Originally envisioned as a Hyatt Summerfield Suites, and later revived as a planned Maplewood Suites Extended-Stay hotel with 127 rooms, it had become known instead as the “zombie hotel” after work had been halted for a third time amid unpaid bills.

That’s when DMG officials – who were already at work on Auden Buffalo – discovered it while driving down Sweet Home.

“We were intrigued by the backstory there. We started to ask around for information about the status of the project and what was happening there,” Hamill said. “We figured this was a zombie that could definitely be brought back to life.”

The company “saw the potential” for a multifamily conversion, with the hotel room layouts fitting well for studio apartments, he said.

“We tried to make as few structural changes to the building as possible,” Hamill said. “Based on our market research, we saw there was strong demand for that type of unit.”

Indeed, Hamill noted that while Air Buffalo is multifamily in nature, it’s getting “a lot of strong interest from students, given its proximity to the university.” And in some cases, students have even expressed interest in moving from the smaller, shared spaces of Auden Buffalo on North Forest to the separate apartments at Air Buffalo. So DMG has even extended its university shuttle from Auden to now include the new property as well.