In The News

EXCLUSIVE: $60 million office development coming to West Chester

September 23, 2015  |  Kubicki Office Park
Kubicki Office Park

Cincinnati Business Courier

A local commercial real estate development company purchased nearly 18 acres of land in West Chester Township and plans to build a $60 million office park.

Kubicki Real Estate Partners purchased 17.9 acres of land from an affiliate of Duke Realty Corp. for $2.4 million, or about $134,000 per acre. Michael and David Kubicki plan to build three office buildings on the site with a total of 300,000 square feet of class A space. Once completely developed, the site could be home to 1,200 jobs and $60 million worth of real estate.

“This was a golden opportunity to get in the West Chester market,” Michael Kubicki told me.

David Kubicki said accessibility, location and infrastructure made the property attractive.

“The access is incredible,” David told me in the Kubickis’ Sycamore Township office.

The property, North Pointe at Union Centre, is just east of Streets of West Chester and directly south of two GE Aviation office buildings that sold for $66 million earlier this year.

The brothers have already started having conversations with potential tenants. For office tenants looking for large blocks of contiguous, class A space, there aren’t many options.

David Kubicki said they are talking with a financial services company that needs between 40,000 and 60,000 square feet of space. If that tenant commits, Kubicki Real Estate Partners would build a 100,000- to 120,000-square-foot office building.

Tom Powers, Mike Sullivan and Scott Abernethy with the Cincinnati office of Cushman & Wakefield, formerly DTZ, represented Duke Realty in the sale. The buyers were self represented.

Abernethy said the West Chester submarket needs new office space. With a total inventory of about 1.5 million square feet, the occupancy rate is about 95 percent.

Aside from a 17,000-square-foot, single-story office building, the next largest block of class A space in the West Chester area is 4,000 square feet, Abernethy said.

“This intersection is ripe for speculative office construction,” Abernethy told me. “The market is so tight.”

While the Kubickis aren’t planning to start a completely speculative building, Michael Kubicki said they hope to start construction on the first building in 2016.

Each of the three buildings planned for the site would be four stories, ranging in size from 90,000 square feet to about 120,000 square feet. The Kubickis said they will be competitive on price point. They are asking $15 per square foot for space.

The developers are working with Sharonville-based architecture firm McGill Smith Punshon Inc. They are already in talks with a number of general contractors about constructing the buildings.

The Kubickis said the location is attractive to medical and corporate office users.

The sale is another example of Indianapolis-based Duke Realty’s exit from the suburban office industry. I wrote about Duke Realty’s shift in focus in July. Duke Realty is focused on industrial real estate, not just in Cincinnati, but nationwide, a strategy it started in 2009.

Since July, Duke Realty sold its Blue Ash office portfolio and put four class A office buildings in Deerfield Township up for sale.

Michael Kubicki said with big office developers such as Duke no longer in the market, that has opened up opportunities for local developers in the area.

“If Duke was still in the office market, they would have built a building there by now,” Michael Kubicki told me.

 

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