Long-term developers buy 6.3 acres on the 300 West corridor in Ballpark
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A slate of developers has purchased a 6.3-acre assemblage of properties in the Ballpark neighborhood in a sign that the ongoing buildout of the 300 West corridor will continue, though not necessarily right away.
The acquisition occurred before the Larry H. Miller Company announced this month that it would move the city’s AAA baseball team out of the neighborhood that had been home for semi-professional baseball for more than a century.
The land will likely only see incremental development over time, and no major projects have been announced to date for the land that’s centered around 1500 S. 300 W. in the Ballpark neighborhood.
But the developers involved in the purchase say they’re thinking long-term, and the sale went through after Building Salt Lake first reported the Millers might be heading for the exits and into the suburbs.
And while there’s no immediate plan for a major redevelopment of the properties involved in the sale, the buyers say they’re in for the long haul.
“What we do is we make concentrated investments in markets and on sites across the country that we have high conviction in,” said Troy Marcus, founder of Evergen Equity, which was part of the buying team. “Where we’re different from many real estate companies out there is we own assets not for years but for decades and generations.”
“We will own them as they are now until the market conditions lend themselves to development,” Marcus said.
Evergen paired up with BCG Holdings, the firm owned by Brandon Blaser, on the purchase of properties centered around 1500 S. 300 W. in the Ballpark neighborhood.
Blaser’s firm has shown it is interested in making long-term investments in multifamily residential, both market-rate and low-income.
BCG owns a significant amount of the developable land in the Granary District. It has master planned the Post District and is moving ahead with developing that area.
Unlike those properties, the 300 West assemblage isn’t part of an opportunity zone. But it is part of the new State Street redevelopment area, which stretches from the Central Business District at 300 South to the city’s boundary at 2100 South.
That lack of opportunity zone status means development isn’t held to as tight of a timeline as, say, the Post District or many properties in the Granary, where developers get preferential tax treatment for investing capital gains in real estate development.
That’s the type of development Evergen typically gets involved in, Marcus said.
“We don’t have the motivation to get in and out of deals quickly,” Marcus said. “In turn, we invest in our projects in the communities that we’re in maybe more deeply than is the standard amount for our industry.”
The entire area is zoned General Commercial (CG), which is the same zoning throughout the Granary.
Christian Priskos and Chris Metos with InterNet Properties represented the firms on the purchase.
The 6.3 acres comes from five parcels the teams put together.
“When you’re able to get that kind of critical mass you have the ability to kind of placemake,” Marcus said. “Let’s really think about how we can create an environment and almost like an ecosystem to best serve our constituents.”
Land between 300 West and Interstate 15 and 1500 South to 1600 South puts this future development just west of the Gail Miller homeless resource center and shelter.
In late-December, the teams were working to finalize a lease with a first commercial tenant. Marcus declined to elaborate on the tenant at the time. But he did offer some clues, saying it would likely be a “fun and experiential” business.
“We’ve kind of whittled it down to two users now,” he said. “Either of them would be great to the neighborhood. I would say not dissimilar to the climbing gym.”
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