Tuesday, September 22, 2009
South-side corridor finds medical niche Tom Harton - tharton@ibj.com IBJ staff Two medical projects under construction along East County Line Road in Greenwood are the latest developments in a corridor that has become a magnet for medical office space. Alderson Commercial Group is building a nearly 30,000-square-foot building at 333 E. County Line Road for Community Physicians of Indiana, a doctors' practice affiliated with Community Hospital South. And at 747 E. County Line Road, Allen Commercial Group is building a 41,000-square-foot building, a quarter of which will be occupied by St. Francis Hospital. The new buildings and others that have been added in recent years are sandwiched between the St. Francis-Indianapolis hospital complex at Emerson Avenue and Stop 11 Road, and Community South, which is on County Line just west of U.S. 31. With the new projects, more than 200,000 square feet of space will have been built in the last five years along East County Line Road between Emerson and Madison avenues. |
"The area between Madison and Emerson has become a medical corridor because it gives doctors access to both hospitals," said Rebecca Baer, a broker with Summit Realty who has listings in the area. Baer handles leasing for County Line Commons, a 12,800-square-foot building about midway between the two hospitals. The building, which was developed in 2004 by partners Brian Murphy and Brad Richey, is 84 percent full following the signing of two leases for a total of 5,000 square feet in the last three months. One of the new tenants is Decatur Vein Clinic, which has 11 clinics throughout Indiana and two other states but never has had a presence on the south side. "We tend to go to areas where there are a lot of physicians because a lot of our business is from referrals," said Kelly Ponko, marketing coordinator for the practice. The concentration of physicians in the area and the high visibility along County Line Road were factors in determining where the clinic's 12th location would be, Ponko said. Rents in the area range from $13.50 to $21.50, said Baer, who said rents are likely to become more competitive as a variety of ownership groups build in the area. Allen Commercial Group, which is among the area's most prolific developers, at one point had the area almost to itself. Early in the decade it developed the four-building Indiana American Office Park, which houses about 145,000 square feet of space. The buildings, which Allen has since sold, weren't built specifically for medical users, but health care tenants filled most of the buildings, said Allen's John Cunningham. That prompted the company in 2006 to build the nearly 94,000-square-foot Greenbrooke Medical Pavilion exclusively for medical tenants. Although the recession has taken its toll on commercial real estate, Baer thinks there's been a silver lining for the East County Line Road corridor. The rocky economy has forced medical groups to seek out new areas of opportunity, she said, and they're finding it in the Greenwood area, which has never had the concentration of physician practices found in other parts of the Indianapolis region. |
|
