Citimark rejoins development game

Citimark Realty Partners is dipping its toes back into the development waters more than a decade after abandoning new projects to focus on management and leasing.

The company, founded in 1982, last month broke ground on an 8,000-square-foot medical building near the northwest corner of 86th Street and Allisonville Road. The project is the first of three buildings the company plans to develop in what it is calling Gardens at Castle Creek.

Citimark started marketing the three-parcel, 2.4-acre site back in 2007 but scaled back marketing when commercial real estate fell on hard times shortly thereafter, said Gus Sevastianos, Citimark’s director of leasing and marketing.

The firm renewed its marketing effort about six months ago. “There’s a niche for this type of product, for small medical users,” said Sevastianos.

The parcel where development is under way was sold to Katherine Enyon Orr, a dentist who is moving her practice to the building. Sevastianos said Orr will occupy all or most of the building. It hasn’t been determined whether Citimark will manage it for her. PNC Bank is financing the project for Orr, who was represented by Halakar Real Estate, now Newmark Knight Frank Halakar.

Citimark is asking one price, between $195 and $205 per square foot, to anyone interested in buying one of the three parcels in Gardens at Castle Creek and having Citimark develop it. The price includes $25 per square foot for interior build-out. The building under construction, which is expected to be completed in May, is farther from 86th and Allisonville than the other two sites and was therefore on the low end of the price range, Sevastianos said.

The two remaining building sites are designed for another 8,000-square-foot building and a 6,440-square-foot building. Sevastianos said the developer expects to sell a second building this year and the third in 2012. Because the larger of the two sites fronts 86th Street it could accommodate retail use, but it won’t become a strip shopping center. Citimark wants all three buildings to conform to the Prairie-style exterior design, which features brick and large expanses of glass.

The Gardens at Castle Creek represent a return to development for Citimark, which operated as a developer for years but began in the 1990s focusing more of its attention on buying and managing buildings and leasing space. Sevastianos said the company owned around 4 million square feet of space at one time but is now down to about 1.9 million square feet split between Indianapolis and Cincinnati.

The company has been shrinking its portfolio over the last decade but is now looking for development opportunities, he said. “We want to get back to our old form.”

Among the properties Citimark sold was most of Castle Creek Corporate Park, which it bought in partnership with New Boston Fund Inc. from Sunbeam Development in 1999. Five years ago it sold four Castle Creek office buildings on the east side of Allisonville Road to California-based Blue Real Estate. Those buildings are in foreclosure.

Citimark kept two older Castle Creek office buildings on the west side of Allisonville. That two-building package included the land Citimark is now marketing as Gardens at Castle Creek. Last March Citimark bought out its partner in those properties, New Boston.