Brenwick turns over commercial sales, leasing at Village of West Clay

Brenwick Development has turned over commercial sales and leasing responsibilities for its signature development, The Village of West Clay, to an outside firm.

Ambrose Property Group, a commercial leasing and development company headed by former Duke Realty Corp. broker Aasif Bade, took over for Brenwick, which is primarily a residential developer, at the beginning of the year.

“We’re going to aggressively find ways to get deals done in 2011 both on the retail and office side,” Bade said.

Village of West Clay covers 680 acres at 131st Street and Towne Road in Hamilton County. It’s primarily a residential development, but it has two big commercial nodes: Uptown at 131st and Towne and Village Centre Shoppes in the development’s interior. Between the two, there is the potential for about 275,000 square feet of commercial development. Of that total, about 175,000 square feet remains to be developed.

Eleven of 14 building sites are still available in Uptown, which so far is home to a CVS drugstore and branches of Chase Bank and the National Bank of Indianapolis. The Village Centre has the potential for approximately 20 more sites. So far, it’s a mix of single-tenant and multi-tenant retail and office buildings.

Bade said his firm’s goal is to have the entire project fully developed in three to five years. Part of the sales pitch is that building sites in the development are pre-zoned, he said. The Uptown section, for example, could accommodate a 50,000-square-foot retailer without the zoning battles often associated with suburban commercial development.

Bade’s firm, founded in November 2008, has grown from three employees in August 2009 to seven today.

“This is significant for us,” Bade said, “because it gives us an opportunity to do development work there.” The firm, founded just as commercial real estate took a dive, hasn’t done any development yet but expects to announce a project in the next month of so.

Development of the Village of West Clay started in 1999, and about 80 percent of the residential component is sold out.

“We had considered the commercial in here something that was going to be hard to do until the latter part of the project,” said Brenwick President George Sweet. As residential development winds down and the population of western Clay Township ticks up, the time was right to bring in a firm whose expertise is in commercial real estate, Sweet said.

Brenwick has about 200 lots to sell out of a total of 1,700 residential units in the development. The larger number includes some multi-family units.

Last summer, the company sold 76 lots to Pulte Homes, which builds in a variety of price ranges. Some residents of Village of West Clay, which is known for its high-end, custom homes, objected, fearing that houses Pulte built wouldn’t measure up.

Sweet noted that Pulte had already built houses in the development and that anything the company builds has to meet strict design standards that apply to all development in Village of West Clay.