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WORCESTER, MA-Capmark Finance Inc. has secured $16.9 million in financing to facilitate the purchase and repositioning of the Worcester Business Center. The former global headquarters of Thom McAn shoes was sold to a partnership that includes Suffolk Ventures and Weiner Ventures, a pair of Boston companies active in Massachusetts commercial real estate.

"The community will benefit from the renovation of a prominent office/industrial building into office space of a higher quality," says Capmark SVP Claudia Piper, who originated the loan package. Lower-cost financing was provided via new market tax credits, she explains, while a portion of the monies will be used to make capital investments into the six-story, 285,000-sf property. The purchase price for the building and 13-acre site was $10.5 million.

Thom McAn departed from the property at 67 Millbrook St. in the mid-1990s after being acquired by a competitor. A Concord company, Worcester Millbrook LLC, paid $1.2 million for the asset in 1999 and recast the hulking structure as the Worcester Business Center, managing to attract a substantial number of tenants in the subsequent years. The attributes as an office destination are a location at the confluence of Interstates 190 and 290 and a solid physical countenance, Piper says. The building was constructed in 1920.