Known as Roanoke Village, the 6.25-acre site will be anchored by a 76,000-square-foot hotel and could include more than 145,000 square feet of medical or office space. Site plans for the proposed project indicate an additional 46,573 square feet more are designated as restaurant and retail space.
“We’re selling the downtown nostalgia,” said broker Derek Anthony, whose real estate company, Woodmont, is in charge of leasing available space at Roanoke Village. “It’s the most amount of continuous land for sale on the downtown strip, and that’s an added value," he said.
Located at the southeast corner of U.S. 377 and Parish Lane, Roanoke Village will be home to the second hotel in the downtown area.
The Peabody Hotel and Conference Center received approval last year. Roanoke Village will feature a 4-story, 128-room Springhill Suites by Marriott located adjacent to the Watermark apartments.
“We’re developing that land to put up the Springhill Suites,” Newstream Commercial CEO Tim Nystrom said. “Some complementary use for that development is office and medical.”
Site plans indicate an additional four lots on the development at a minimum of 28,000 square feet each.
“We have two concepts,” Anthony said, noting that the site could eventually feature medical or office uses as well as restaurant and retail space on lots facing U.S. 377.
Roanoke Village is also build-to-suit, Anthony said, which means entrepreneurs will have the option of constructing their own building without buying land and then negotiating a lease.
“It’s market-driven,” Roanoke City Manager Scott Campbell said. “They’re building pads and getting the site ready because they’re that confident that things will come here and that they’ll get signatures on the lease. Some developers are more comfortable with that than others.”
With hopes of targeting high-profile retail, medical, office and restaurant clients, Newstream has poured money into a number of entitlements to make Roanoke Village as build-ready as possible, Anthony said.
“In the real estate world, that means it’s shovel-ready,” Anthony said. “All you have to do is submit your plan to the city, and you’re ready to go.”
According to Anthony, the total cost of Newstream’s initial expenses on entitlements—such as access roads to U.S. 377 and Parish, curbs, landscaping, sewage and utilities—totals $11 per square foot. That comes to nearly $3 million for the more than 268,000-square-foot development.
“It speaks to their confidence that they could do that,” Campbell said. “That’s happening more and more over the years, where people are building buildings without knowing who the end users are going to be because they feel so confident they will get them [leased].”
The demand is coming to Roanoke, Nystrom said, and many entrepreneurs do not have the funds or experience to navigate the entitlement process with local municipalities.
“They want to buy a pad that’s ready to go, and we need to be able to put in all the infrastructure,” Nystrom said. “We believe in Roanoke. There is a lot of growth occurring on the residential and business side.”
