ALTON, ILL. — U-Haul plans to acquire an 84,180-square-foot building formerly occupied by Kmart in Alton, about 25 miles north of St. Louis, in August. U-Haul, which currently leases the property, will transform the space into 700 climate-controlled, self-storage units with truck and trailer sharing and towing equipment onsite. The building, which had previously been vacant for eight months, is located within the Seminary Plaza shopping center. Madison Plaza Associates was the seller. U-Haul’s acquisition of the property was driven by its corporate sustainability initiative. The company says the adaptive reuse of existing buildings reduces the amount of energy and resources required for new-building materials and helps cities reduce their unwanted inventory of unused buildings.
LAWRENCE, MASS. — MassHousing and Trinity Financial have broken ground on Van Brodie Mill, a 102-unit, mixed-income housing community in Lawrence. Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera, Executive Director of MassHousing Chrystal Kornegay and State Representative Frank Moran attended the groundbreaking, which took place on June 6. The adaptive reuse project, which is located at 590 Broadway,will preserve a historic former mill in the Arlington Mills historic district. Trinity Financial is a real estate development firm specializing in redeveloping urban sites in the Northeast. The cost of the project was not disclosed.
ST. LOUIS — Digital publishing and technology firm Multiply and DNA technology company Orion Genomics have signed office leases at City Foundry in St. Louis. Together, the two companies will occupy 30,000 square feet and add almost 100 employees to the development. Previously announced leases at City Foundry include Alamo Drafthouse Theaters, Punch Bowl Social and Fassler Hall. Construction is expected to begin this summer with completion slated for the second half of 2019. Steve Smith is the developer of the $187 million mixed-use project, which involves the adaptive reuse of the former Century Electric Foundry complex. S.M. Wilson is the construction manager and Lawrence Group is the architect.
Memphis ended 2017 with an overall vacancy rate of 14.8 percent, which is up slightly from where the year started at 14.5 percent — the highest level in three years. As the saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and this especially applies to the Memphis office market. In 2017, 600,000 square feet of office space was absorbed. Developers also started 2017 with more than 1.2 million square feet of new office space in the pipeline, with 800,000 square feet delivered last year and the other 400,000 square feet expected to be delivered by the end of the first quarter this year. So within just six months, nearly 6 percent of Memphis’ total office market size was added to the overall available space. That is more new product being delivered than the city has seen in over a decade. Of this 1.2 million square feet, nearly 80 percent will come from adaptive reuse projects, where previously non-functioning properties located in non-core submarkets have undergone significant repurposing. The Sears Crosstown building was erected in 1927 as a 1.5 million-square-foot, mail-order processing warehouse and Sears retail store. The project was the largest building in Memphis at the time of its …
PHILADELPHIA — Kimco Realty’s Lincoln Square mixed-use project currently under development will be the site of Philadelphia’s first Sprouts Farmers Market. The 32,000-square-foot store is part of the adaptive reuse of Lincoln Square’s historic train station and will incorporate the Gothic Revival elements of the property. Work on the redevelopment project at the corner of South Broad Street and Washington Avenue, began in late 2016. Sprouts is one of the fastest growing grocers in the United States and has opened 30 stores in 2018. Other retail tenants that have signed on to the development include Target, PetSmart, Starbucks and Sprint. The project will also include 322 residential units. Residential move-ins are planned to begin this summer, with Sprouts set to open in the third quarter of 2018.
NEW YORK CITY — Jamestown LP has sold Chelsea Market in Manhattan to Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) for $2.4 billion. Formerly a Nabisco factory in the West Chelsea district, the nearly 1.2 million-square-foot complex features office and retail space, as well as a large food hall on the ground floor that serves more than 500,000 locals and tourists on a monthly basis. The property occupies an entire city block bounded by Ninth and Tenth avenues between 15th and 16th streets. Jamestown will continue to manage Chelsea Market’s food hall and retail component. “I don’t think we could think of a more appropriate buyer and better steward for the asset. We’ve been working with Google for 17 years and we’ve watched them grow from 30 people in an office to now being one of the largest tech employers in the city,” says Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown. “It’s a bittersweet day. We’ve spent a lot of time there, and we love all the tenants. We’ll continue to have our offices there, but I think it’s a good time for Google to step in.” In 2010, Jamestown and its partners sold 111 Eighth Avenue, a roughly 3 million-square-foot office building in Manhattan, …
Office developers in Chicago are thinking outside the box — and outside the central business district — in order to cater to tenants in search of creative office space. While there will always be companies that want the cachet that a business address in the Loop offers, others realize the strategic advantages of urban, non-CBD locations as a recruiting tool. Live/work/play neighborhoods like River North and the West Loop are growing because high-profile employers want to attract a younger workforce that is drawn to the loft-style offices these neighborhoods can provide. This can be achieved either through ground-up development projects like McDonald’s soon-to-open headquarters at 1035 W. Randolph St., or adaptive reuse projects such as 1K Fulton, a former cold-storage facility that now counts Google among its tenants. Yet as rents in these submarkets continue to climb, office users are starting to ask whether they can get the same space for less money in equally desirable locations. For many, the answer is a resounding “yes.” New opportunities While neighborhoods near the CBD such as River West and Pilsen have benefitted from this office “ripple effect,” Chicago’s recently rezoned North Branch Industrial Corridor is perhaps the most alluring and uncharted territory …
Everyone is familiar with the expression “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” However, what most people do not know is that the second half of that phrase is, “but they were laying bricks every hour.” Bricklayers in Nashville are busy people these days, accommodating the demand for new commercial development. That’s not just a metaphor for the developers of record — the utility contractors, dirt movers, pavers, framers and roofers are all busy trying to keep up with the constant stream of construction. With record levels of construction comes the high demand for a skilled workforce to complete the necessary work. We constantly hear that approximately 30,000 people are moving to Nashville per year. However, a large amount of this new workforce via this in-migration are millennials looking to work in the IT or healthcare fields rather than skilled labor. If you were to ask any “bricklayer” what concerns them the most, almost assuredly the recruitment and retention of qualified labor will be at the forefront of the conversation. With the younger generation less likely to enter the blue collar workforce, why in 2017 did we see 6 million square feet of industrial warehouse space delivered? Make no mistake, that …
Eight years into the recovery, Raleigh-Durham’s office market conditions remain decidedly in favor of landlords, but increased construction following years of limited development activity is at last providing much needed new leasing opportunities for tenants. While a combination of factors, including new construction, drove office vacancy higher by the second half of 2017, the market began the year with the tightest Class A leasing market witnessed since the dot-com boom. Class A vacancy bottomed out in the first quarter of 2017 at 9.1 percent, down from a cyclical peak of 17.6 percent in the third quarter of 2009, and the lowest level since fourth-quarter 2000. Class A vacancy rose to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2017 as a wave of new deliveries hit the market. Total vacancy ended the third quarter at 13.5 percent, up 70 basis points year-over-year. It is worth noting that this figure includes a handful of large, formerly corporate-owned facilities in the Interstate 40/Research Triangle Park (RTP) submarket. Originally constructed for single tenants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Dupont and Reichold, these facilities are likely to need substantial retrofitting to achieve lease-up. While they are certainly a factor in the market, they are not an option …
LAWRENCE, MASS. — An affiliate of Trinity Financial has received $17.1 million in financing for the development of an affordable housing community in Lawrence. MassHousing has provided a $14 million conduit bridge loan, $1.2 million in permanent financing and $1.9 million in workforce housing funds for the project. Trinity Financial will transform the former Van Brodie Mill into a 102-unit mixed-income housing community. Designed by ICON Architecture, the property will contain eight studio apartments, 25 one-bedroom apartments, 56 two-bedroom apartments and 13 three-bedroom apartments. Aberthaw Construction is the contractor and Trinity Management will manage the completed property. The adaptive reuse project will preserve the historic former mill, while remediating a brownfield site. Constructed in 1919 by the Arlington Mills company, the Van Brodie Mill originally manufactured yarn for wool and flannel. By the 1950s, the Arlington Mills company has closed and the Van Brodie Mill was operated by a company that shifted production to food products, including packaged breakfast cereals and rations for the military.