Introducing Our People’s Choice Nominees:
Today, Meet Becknell’s Pete Anderson and
Cassidy Turley’s Mike Weishaar
You may have heard mention of our first annual Real Estate People’s Choice Awards dinner coming up in February. This award ceremony is unique because the nominees and winners will all be chosen by you, the commercial Real Estate People. No one likes to be an uninformed voter, so we’re going to provide profiles and pics of all our nominees, starting with Pete Anderson, EVP and Principal at Becknell Industrial, and Mike Weishaar, Managing Director and Principal at Cassidy Turley, and their brainchild, the North by Northwest development at 86th and Georgetown.
Mike was well familiar with the 31 acre site when he approached Pete with the idea to purchase and develop it. “I’ve been in the market here for twelve years, and I think this parcel of land was on and off the market almost every year,” Mike said. Since he services buildings adjacent to the site, Mike was familiar with the land and saw potential there, a vision he shared with Pete when it was finally up for grabs. “Becknell has an amazing national reputation, but their name wasn’t on a lot of projects here in their own backyard,” Mike explained. “I knew Pete was eager to have a positive impact here, and this seemed like the right opportunity.”
We all know Indy is fast emerging as a top tier industrial market, but Pete and his team made sure to study the current needs of the area before beginning development on the site, which Becknell purchased in 2013. “We held the ground for about a year just to see what the market would bring us,” Pete said. “We learned that the smaller users already established in the area didn’t have a place to go when they needed to grow.”
Most of the buildings in the Park 100 corridor were developed decades ago, and tenants looking to modernize or expand didn’t have the options they needed (like ceiling height, modern HVAC, and life safety systems) to keep them in Marion County. “We witnessed a lot of companies in this area move their businesses outside the county because they couldn’t find the building they needed nearby,” Pete said. “That’s one of the reasons I think Marion County saw the benefit of giving us a tax abatement when we drew up the plans. They’d love to see new tenants from outside, but they definitely don’t want to lose businesses to other areas.”
The site will boast 3 buildings, one at 266,400 sq.ft., which will be ready in February 2015, and two at 124,000 sq. ft. each, slated to be completed in June 2015. 56,000 sq. ft. of one of the smaller buildings is already leased to a tenant from Park 100 (just like the guys hoped) and interest is only growing from local businesses and Indy newcomers alike. As both Mike and Pete emphasized during our conversation, the location is a proven industrial success, with access to public transit, restaurant and hotel amenities, and Indy’s network of interstates. Mike also mentioned that they have found a sweet spot in the market in terms of location, supply, and demand. “These facilities aren’t in competition with a lot of the larger space under construction right now. The market in this neighborhood dictated this development and it was the right move,” he said. Pete agreed, saying “New development needs come in all shapes and sizes. With this plan, we can accommodate 25,000 sf users all the way up to 265,000 sf. That allows us to take a wide swath of tenants with demand and offer them opportunities.”
The person submitting this nomination told us, “If I had to sum up the nomination, it would be this: Michael Weishaar presented Becknell with the opportunity for the land and it’s potential. Pete Anderson had the vision and execution to get these buildings out of the ground and work with the City of Indianapolis to provide the incentives to make the project successful. A great example of a total team effort and a great public-private partnership coming together.”