MINNEAPOLIS—The owner of the Colonial Warehouse, a historic asset located in the heart of the North Loop district of Minneapolis, has decided to put the 181,200 square foot brick and timber building up for sale. The property should generate national interest from investors that want to take advantage of the growing demand for creative office space in one of the region's fastest growing neighborhoods.
“The North Loop is also filling up with new housing, hotels and retail,” Steven Buss of CBRE tells GlobeSt.com. “Housing and office conversions led the way, but we're seeing demand across uses for spaces in these historic buildings.” A Minneapolis-based CBRE team of Buss, Ryan Watts, Judd Welliver, Tom Holtz and Sonja Dusil, has been chosen by the private owner to market the building.
Another source tells GlobeSt.com that the five-story building could go for about $25 million and perhaps more.
The North Loop district has gotten so popular that major developers have started constructing new brick and timber buildings in the neighborhood that mimic its 19th century industrial style. This summer, for example, Houston-based Hines broke ground on a seven-story mass timber office building in the North Loop called T3, which stands for timber, transit and technology.
The Colonial Warehouse was built in 1890 and has already been renovated into modern office and retail space. In recent years, such spaces would serve creative or service-oriented office users such as ad agencies or start-up firms. “That's evolving as some of the larger firms have started looking in the North Loop,” Buss says. Minneapolis is home to the world headquarters of four Fortune 500 companies: Target; US Bancorp; Ameriprise Financial; and Thrivent Financial.
The snowmobile maker Arctic Cat, he points out, just decided to move its corporate headquarters from suburban Plymouth to the 107-year-old Western Container Building at 500 N. 3rd St. in the North Loop. Increasingly, even manufacturing firms like this also view themselves as design firms with a creative focus, and believe that to recruit the best new talent they need a city address.
Pension funds and other big institutional investors can see that the incredible demand for creative office spaces in cities like San Francisco and Chicago has spread to all major markets, Buss adds, and many have decided that this is a separate product niche for which they need to allocate a certain amount of dollars. “If you're the owner of creative office space, you're in a really good situation.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
