New Industrial Development in Roseville
Crow Co., a Dallas-based developer with a big history in Minnesota, has tied up a piece of land in Roseville where it intends to develop a 185,000-square-foot industrial building.
Trammell Crow has a 13-acre site at 2305 Walnut St. under contract to buy for an undisclosed sum from Minneapolis-based Meritex Enterprises Inc. The property is near the intersection of Interstate 35W and Highway 280.
CBRE Group industrial real estate brokersMatt Oelschlager, John Ryden and Andrew Petkoff are marketing the site on behalf of Trammell Crow. The building, called the Midtown Business Center, will have 32-foot tall ceilings.
Trammell Crow plans to spend the next two to three months going through the Roseville city-approval process and may begin construction on ‘spec’ even if it doesn’t have any signed leases, according to Dan Williams, chief investment officer for Meritex, who is selling the site.
This is exactly the type of project I expected from Trammell Crow as it tries to re-establish itself as an active developer in the Twin Cities after about a decade of not being a player at all. In the 1980s and 1990s, Trammell Crow developed the Colonnade Tower in Golden Valley and the Normandale Lake Office Park in Bloomington.
Officials from Trammell Crow, which is owned by Los Angeles-based CBRE Group, couldn’t be reached for comment, but they have a tendency not to speak about new projects until they close on land deals and have city entitlements complete.
Last May, I had lunch at Zelo with John Carlson (who played football for the University of Minnesota and is from Minnetonka) and Grady Hamilton (who grew up in southwest Minneapolis and previously worked for Minneapolis apartment developer Michael Lander and for Opus North Corp.) from Trammell Crow when they were in town visiting from Trammell’s Chicago office.
The men, who are leading the company’s Minneapolis development efforts, said they’d be doing some residential projects and then probably get into the industrial market here.
They’ve done both. Shortly after that first story they announced plans for two new apartment development projects. One of them is called Junction Flats and its under construction in the North Loop area of Minneapolis and the other is next to the Colonnade Tower in Golden Valley. Trammell Crow is also acting as a developer for a fee on an industrial site in Lakeville.
“They told me they had done their research on Minneapolis and believe that it’s an attractive place to invest, and they’ve got a team that knows their way around Minneapolis,” Williams said.
Meritex has owned the land since the 1960s. Last year, it razed a 700,000-square-foot vacant industrial building that had been part of a 42-acre total site there. It started selling off parcels and is now down to just one nine-acre site.
The Roseville location should appeal to companies that want easy and centralized truck access to the Twin Cities, Williams said.
“It will be someone who wants to be in the Midway area,” he said. “Being in the hub of the city pays real dividends.”
