The property includes more than 800 parking spaces and lakefront views. (Image courtesy JLL)
A sizable office compound in Goochland’s West Creek Business Park long owned and occupied by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has been left empty and put on the market.
The Richmond Fed earlier this month listed for sale its 28-acre property at 12560 West Creek Parkway.
The gated, highly secured site is home to a six-story, 200,000-square-foot office building that a Fed spokesman said had been primarily used by the bank’s IT staff before being gradually vacated over the course of the pandemic and in the ensuing years.
Built in 1997 for the now-defunct furniture company Heilig-Meyers, the property was sold to the Richmond Fed in February 2003 for $15 million, according to Goochland property records.
Richmond Fed spokesman Jim Strader said the organization allows employees to work remotely two days a week, which helped eliminate its need for the West Creek building while utilizing its other existing offices in downtown Richmond, and smaller outposts in Baltimore and Charlotte.
“We decided to sell it based on an assessment of what our office needs are and decided this no longer fit our needs,” Strader said.
The Fed kept the property gated and highly secured.
As one of the Federal Reserve System’s 12 regional banks, the Richmond Fed’s territory covers Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, the Carolinas and most of West Virginia.
It has 1,500 employees in Richmond, about 220 in Charlotte and 110 in Baltimore.
JLL brokers Jimmy Appich and Charlie Polk are handling the listing of the West Creek property. Appich declined to comment about the property when reached Wednesday.
No asking price is included in the marketing materials; however, a source familiar with the listing said the price tag is around $28 million. The property was most recently assessed by the county at $26.7 million.
JLL’s listing states that the property is well-suited for a single large tenant. The building features a café, fitness center and a location along the waterfront of one of West Creek’s lakes.
It has 830 surface parking spaces, a full-building generator, onsite water tank and furniture leftover from the Fed.
Also part of the offering are two additional undeveloped and mostly wooded adjacent parcels owned by the Fed.
The Richmond Fed also owns two adjacent undeveloped parcels.
The JLL listing says that extra acreage offers an opportunity for “expanded or alternative development potentially tailored to support the growing residential base.” It also mentions possibilities of using the excess land for additional office, medical office, multifamily, and retail development.
The property comes on the market at a tough time for office space generally and as West Creek continues to see new types of uses beyond its traditional business park tenants such as CarMax, Capital One, Performance Food Group and Farm Bureau.
The park is now home to apartment complexes, Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, a sizable rehab hospital from Sheltering Arms and VCU, and a massive retirement community from Erickson Living and an industrial scale hydroponic produce operation from Greenswell Growers.
Single-family home subdivisions have also taken root in the park, including The Bluftons, which will feature dozens of million-dollar South Carolina-style homes from Eagle Construction of VA.
Prepare for the storm. That is your only hint, i’m not answering questions.
This would be an excellent opportunity to redress the land use of the site. Regionally speaking, it would be a great site for dense housing though the price tag makes that difficult without a prime office tenant. My guess is that something creativevwill take place here beyond a mere corporate HQ.