Cincinnati

With downtown Cincinnati’s apartment vacancy rate far below office space vacancies, some investors are purchasing office buildings and converting them into apartments. One such investor is Indianapolis-based Anderson Birkla Investment Partners. It acquired the 580 Building on February 5 for $13.7 million. The company now intends to redevelop the property into a mix of residential, office and entertainment space.

DunhumbyUSA broke ground on Thursday, January 31, on its new headquarters building at Fifth and Race streets in downtown Cincinnati. Hundreds of people were present at the ground breaking ceremony. Among them, Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory and other city, state and company officials.

Dubbed the ”Dunnhumby Centre”, the new building will cost $122 million to build. It will sit in the heart of downtown and will have 280,000 square feet of office space, 30,000 square feet of street-level retail space and an above and below ground parking garage with 1,000 spaces.

The Heidelberg Distributing Co. acquired the former Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. warehouse at 3601 Dryden Road on September 17, 2012. It paid $7.25 million for the 779,000-square-foot facility and is now getting ready to invest $21.2 million to renovate it, according to the Dayton Daily News.

Miller-Valentine Construction is developing the project. It includes the removal of an existing rail system that runs throughout the building that will require replacing approximately 125,000 square feet of concrete floor slab.

Intelligrated Inc., a leading North American-based, single-point provider of automated material handling solutions, held a ceremony on January 9 to celebrate the grand opening of its $10 million expansion that nearly doubled its headquarters in Mason, Ohio. Company CEO Chris Cole, City of Mason Mayor David Nichols, and Southwest Ohio Regional Liason for Ohio Governor John R. Kasich, Sherri Carbo, were present at the event.

With the 122,000-square-foot addition, Intelligrated’s headquarters, located just off I-71, now has a combined area of 262,000 square feet. It will accommodate an ongoing increase in engineering, research and development staffing. The company added over 160 employees in Ohio over the past year and 275 companywide. It also plans to add 150 more employees by the end of 2013.

Rumpke Consolidated Companies, Inc., one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential and commercial waste and recycling firms, has announced on January 10 it plans to invest $32 million to build a recycling center in St. Bernard, Ohio. The new center will replace the former recycling facility destroyed by a fire in April 2012.Rumpke will build one of the largest and most technologically advanced residential recycling systems in the country. It will be 85,000 square feet and capable of sorting 55 tons of material every hour, more than doubling the capabilities of the previous system.

Two downtown Cincinnati Class A office properties were sold at auction on December 11 according to the Hamilton County Auditor’s website. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Neyer Properties was the buyer.

The two properties are part of the three-building Centennial Plaza office complex, on Central Avenue. Dan Neyer, president of Neyer Properties, told the Cincinnati Enquirer he acquired the two properties via the online auction house Auction.com. He paid $3.5 million for them. The seller was an affiliate of New Boston Citimark, New Boston Centennial LLC. In 1999, New Boston Centennial paid $13 million for the properties.

Construction crews recently broke ground on a new 14-screen Cinemark movie theater at Oakley Station, one of Cincinnati’s largest, new mixed-use developments.

With vacancies dropping and rents growing, apartment construction is on the rise in the Cincinnati Metro Area, and Marcus & Millichap predicts that by year-end the stock will have increased by 1.1 percent as developers finish 1,000 apartments.