LITTLE ROCK — The boards have come down from the windows of an old Gus Blass Co. building at 315 S. Main St., breathing new life into the nearly 110-year-old building - and with it, the city’s hopes for Main Street revitalization.
The building is being renovated to house 30 loft-style apartments and a jazz club and restaurant. Building plans will be unveiled today in a news conference held by Mayor Mark Stodola and Bob East of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership at 11 a.m.
“We’re thrilled. This will be the first announcement on Main Street, on a block that we’ve focused on for about a year,” said Sharon Priest, director of the Downtown Partnership. Priest said the partnership has been working with Reed Realty Advisors, the California and Portland, Ore.-based firm that owns the building.
Scott Reed, a partner in Reed Realty who works in Little Rock, said the apartments will be ready in about a year.
Reed said the units will be “finished out toward the high end of the market” in terms of design and amenities but priced “toward the low end” - units will be about 750 square feet on average and will rent for about $1 per square foot.
The building will also be certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, as a “green” building.
Reed said he’s had his eye on the 300 to 400 block of Main Street since before he moved to Little Rock two years ago from Portland, as one of the few parts of Main that still have all the original buildings intact.
“I just said, ‘This is right in the absolute path of growth in the middle of everything. I don’t know how this building is just sitting here.’”
Reed said his firm came to Little Rock looking for investment opportunities in a market they thought might be less prone to the effects of the real estate downturn and the recession, as projects in California and Las Vegas “got their heads chopped off.” And downtown redevelopment is part of what attracted them, he said.
Though some downtown condominium projects have been slow to fill, Reed said low apartment-vacancy rates and high occupancy rates indicate there is untapped demand for downtown apartment living.
“We’re hoping Main Street becomes the place where you live. You play on President Clinton [Ave.], you work in the core of downtown, and you live on Main Street,” Reed said.
The Lafayette Square building on Louisiana Street started out as exclusively condominiums, but changed its strategy to offer some leases. A project manager with California-based Tower Investments, which owns the building, said earlier this year that the switch and additional price reductions were “absolutely a good strategy” and helped attract people to the building.
Tower Investments originally had grander plans for Lafayette Square, but put three of those buildings, and the old YMCA building on Broadway, back on the market.
Reed said that when he pointed the Main Street building out to Stodola on a drive around the city as one of several properties he was interested in on Main Street, Stodola offered to talk to the owners.
“He said, ‘I know who owns those buildings, let me talk to him.’ And that’s how the conversation started with Mr. [Dean] Kumpuris,” Reed said.
In a deal Reed said was engineered by Stodola and Kumpuris, Reed Realty Advisors bought out Little Rock City Director Kumpuris’ Dee Dee Kay corporation for a “very reasonable” price. With it came ownership of the building.
“For some reason some parties are sensitive to me saying any numbers, but I’ll tell you it was a favorable transaction, and the Kumpuris family was really dedicated to seeing this done sooner rather than later and made the price that attractive,” Reed said.
Efforts to contact Kumpuris on Monday night were unsuccessful.
The 313-315 block of Main Street has an appraised value of $487,614 according to the Pulaski County assessor’s website.
City leaders and developers are hoping that the plans for the Main Street building will signal the beginning of a new phase in downtown revitalization.
The apartment pricing is part of a deliberate strategy to position the building as “the first domino” kicking off future development of buildings on Main Street.
“We’re going to price it to attract [people]. We want to get the units occupied,” Reed said.
Hundreds of people responding to the Downtown Partnership’s online survey of attitudes toward the downtown area and Main Street said they want to live downtown, but find the area unappealing as it is now. But Reed said the apartments will be a good first step toward bringing more people and businesses to the area, solving the “chicken and egg” problem that people don’t want to move to an area with no attractions, but businesses are reluctant to move into an area with few residents.
“For how many vacancies there are on Main Street, you’d be surprised at how many people want to open businesses there,” Reed said.
Information for this article was contributed by Kristin Netterstrom of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Business, Pages 21 on 09/14/2010