A prime block of downtown real estate, with an attached parking deck, should be available soon in Little Rock's core office market.
Little Rock television station KATV is finalizing plans to move to a new headquarters in the city's Riverdale section. The station is targeting its first telecast for mid-January at the new location, 10 Turtle Creek Lane.
"This has been a long time coming," Mark Rose, KATV's general manager, said Friday.
Once the newsroom and news studio move, the downtown building at Fourth and Main streets will be vacated and up for sale, punching a sizable gap in the office market.
Local commercial real estate developers are confident the building will sell and the site will be upgraded.
"It's very unfortunate that they relocated out of downtown, but their building should lease up," said Chris Moses, president and chief executive officer of Moses Tucker Partners, which owns and manages several properties downtown.
Likewise, Todd Rice of Colliers of Arkansas notes the property rests in the Main Street corridor, an area that has been revitalized over the past decade, beginning with the location of the Little Rock Technology Center at 417 Main Street.
"The Main Street corridor has seen some really nice transition over the past decade," said Rice, principal and executive vice president with Colliers who manages and leases property in the core area. "That's a piece of property I have always looked at, and my peers have always looked at, as something that is going to become available. This doesn't come as a surprise to me or anyone else and, in fact, it's probably past time for it to happen."
New owners of the KATV building will join other investors who have purchased iconic downtown properties. This summer, the Regions Center was acquired by a New York hedge fund and the Bank of America building was purchased by Maumelle investor and developer Keith Richardson.
In the past year, Colliers has filled about 40,000 square feet of office leasing in the Lyon Building at 401 W. Capitol Ave.
"Downtown is headed in the right direction office-leasing wise," Rice said. "We're seeing owners spend money on their buildings and they're doing what they need to do to keep tenants and to attract new tenants. We've seen a lot of success down there and we think it's going to continue."
As much as anything, new ownership of the KATV building will have an opportunity to resculpt downtown Little Rock with a modern facility, according to Rice.
"These older buildings have great bones but they're just old and tired," Rice said. "This is going to be a great opportunity for somebody."
The Little Rock Technology Center, located on the same block of Main Street as KATV, has eminent domain rights over the property and seems to be the leading candidate to purchase the site. The tech park is a muti-use office/meeting space supporting entrepreneurs and small-business development.
The technology center has eyed expansion and last year suspended plans to build a five-story, 85,000-square-foot building on a vacant lot that separates the facility and the KATV building.
In March, the Technology Center board was given a plan calling for an $8.5 million investment to revamp the six-story building at Capitol Avenue and Main Street into space that could be used to recruit and house tech-focused entrepreneurs, start-up companies and other innovative enterprises.
Rose said the company will open talks with the Technology Center once the property is vacated.
"I'm sure we'll have those conversations with them soon after we get moved in over here," Rose said from new headquarters.
For the news station, the older building didn't promote collaboration with different operations working from separate floors in silos.
"We were disconnected internally," Rose said. "It wasn't really connecting us together for creative teamwork. We wanted an environment that was inclusive to everyone."
The two-story Turtle Creek location has a prime spot on the west end of the building to feature the most visible part of the business, Rose said. "The newsroom obviously is the heartbeat of a local television station," he added, noting the station wants to make the move in coming weeks when confident everything is in place to deliver a successful newscast.
KATV sales and administration have been working out of the new 22,000-square-foot facility for several months. About 85 to 90 employees are involved in the relocation.
"We've had the most-watched television station in the state for a long, long time and we had facilities that did not match that," Rose said. "And now I am proud of the fact that we will have a new top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art facility that is representative of our business and where we're going."
KATV is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The company purchased the two-story Riverdale property about two years ago for $4.4 million.
The 4th and Main building made its debut in 1928 as headquarters for Worthen Bank. KATV has been broadcasting from the facility for more than 50 years. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.