Sherman Associates

Sherman Associates is a Minneapolis developer and property owner with offices on Park Avenue South at the edge of downtown. The company says it has been developing for over 40 years; it doesn’t give a founding year on the pages we read. Apartments are the core business, market-rate and affordable, alongside condos and commercial space that it manages after completion. Sherman was developer and owner of the Landmark Tower Office-to-Residential Conversion in Saint Paul. The project turned a 25-story downtown office tower into 187 apartments, with BKV Group as architect and Frana Companies as general contractor. Office conversions rarely pencil out, and this one leaned on tax increment financing to get there.

The footprint is wider than the Minneapolis base implies. Sherman Associates names five states – Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri and Colorado – with the Twin Cities and Des Moines among the places it holds property. That matters for anyone reading the firm as a purely local developer. It operates as a regional owner, and what it builds it generally keeps.

Leadership is second generation: George Sherman is chief executive and Chris Sherman is president. That is consistent with a company describing more than 40 years of development without publishing a founding year anywhere on its site.

Three business lines, not one. Apartments and condominiums are the largest, but the firm also develops and holds commercial property and operates in hospitality and retail, hotels included. A mixed-use building with ground-floor retail and a hotel component is therefore something one company can develop, own and run, instead of three parties coordinating across a lease.

Rehabilitation and reuse sit alongside new construction in how the firm describes its work, and that is the thread running to the Landmark Tower conversion noted above. It is a standing practice area rather than a one-off. Taking an existing building and changing what it is used for requires a different underwriting case from building new, usually leaning on public financing tools, and a developer that intends to hold the asset afterwards is weighing a longer horizon than one that intends to sell.

The stated mission – building communities, enriching neighborhoods, empowering people – is worth reading against the mix of market-rate and affordable units in the portfolio. A developer that puts both inside the same building is making a different bet from one that keeps them in separate projects.

The office is at 233 Park Ave South, Suite 201, in Minneapolis, and the main line is (612) 332-3000.