The owners of a motel on Market Street in Wilmington want to convert it into 76 apartments.

Nicholas Silivanch, of Eastern Carolinas Commercial Real Estate, a commercial real estate broker and representative of Premier Hotels LLC, said adapting the Studio 6 Extended Stay motel on nearly 1.3 acres at 4118 Market St. would help provide affordable housing during a time when officials are trying to address an ongoing shortage of such housing.

The Studio 6’s owners “realize that they have the ability, through a change of zoning, to create 76 workforce housing units (the motel has 76 rooms) on a major corridor in Wilmington that's on a bus route, so it'll allow the residents to have access to public transportation, amenities, food, grocery, all of that – are all nearby,” Silivanch said.

He added, “They don't need any special funding sources or anything like that in order to effectuate this change from being hotel rooms into studio apartments.”

Silivanch said the rent could probably be somewhere around $1,000 a month, projected to include utilities. Twenty of the studio apartments would be set aside as affordable, based on a HUD rent limit, for 15 years.

The Wilmington Board of Adjustment approved a request for density and open space code variances to allow the project in October. The project's rezoning request (from RB to MD-17 with a special consideration on density and open space) is expected to go before the Wilmington Planning Commission and city council in the first quarter of 2026, Silivanch said.

“This is simply an administrative change in the zoning code to go from being a hospitality use to a multi-family use,” he said.

Two other motel properties on Market Street have been converted to apartments in recent years, now operating as The Flats at Market St., 4903 Market St., and River City Studio Homes, 5040 Market St.

Adaptive reuse, Silivanch said, is "a better method for transitioning properties from being marginal to being better. We don't impact stormwater; we don't impact utilities; we don't have all the impacts that a brand new development has."