Atlantic Union College finds buyer for shuttered Lancaster campus
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Atlantic Union College's campus in Lancaster
Atlantic Union College in Lancaster has found a buyer for its campus three years after the school officially closed permanently.
The site is under agreement, with a deal planned to close in September, Robert Cronin, an agent with the real estate firm Colliers International, said Thursday.
The news of the pending deal, first reported by the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, came as the sale of portions of the campus closed with the Worcester Registry of Deeds. Those sales, which totaled roughly $1.2 million, include multi-tenant residential buildings on campus and a home on Main Street about two blocks south of campus. The deed was signed Thursday.
The buyer of those sites, which include only relatively small parts of the campus, is a limited liability corporation registered to Raymond and Robert Safi of Andover. The same pair also bought a five-building residential complex from Atlantic Union last March for just under $1.6 million.
The entire 135-acre site that Atlantic Union listed for sale includes nearly a half-million square feet of space spread across 33 buildings, according to the property listing with the real estate firm Colliers International. Colliers' website says the property is no longer for sale.
Atlantic Union closed its doors in 2018 after struggling for years to regain accreditation and bump up the size of its student body, which had fallen down to only roughly 50 students. The school, which opened in 1882, was affiliated with Seventh-day Adventist Church, which helped financially support the school but withdrew funding in the school's last years.
The local management office of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Lancaster didn't return messages seeking comment this week.
Atlantic Union had already begun selling off small parts of its campus in the past few years. That included a 42,000-square-foot office building sold in 2019 and a series of properties sold the next year, including Ross Manor, a five-building residential complex on Main Street, and multi-tenant houses at 69 and 79 Prescott St.
The future of the Lancaster campus is up in the air at a time when smaller colleges have struggled and have, in some cases, been absorbed by larger colleges. In 2018, UMass Amherst took over the Newton campus of Mount Ida College and Wheelock College was folded into nearby Boston University. Pine Manor College in Brookline said last year it would become part of its neighbor, Boston College.
Orlando Pacheco, the Lancaster town administrator, said the town is encouraged by the prospect of a new use of the campus despite not yet knowing more details.
"We're encouraged for a lot of reasons," Pacheco said.
The college is a major part of the town, Pacheco said, and having the campus brought back to active use at some point will be beneficial to the town, the new school and Atlantic Union, which was unable to attract enough new students in its final years to stay solvent. The town will be an active partner in helping with the transition of the campus, he said.
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