Former composite center to get new identity

The former National KETTERING — Composite Center may soon have a new identity, its new owners said Monday.

Jim McCarthy of Cincinnati-based TW Development Group said the property’s future identity will emerge when they have a better idea of who its main tenants and users will be.

To help find those tenants, McCarthy said he has engaged Cushman and Wakefield as leasing brokers. “We’re here for the long haul,” McCarthy said. “We know it’s going to be a multi-year development process.”

Those who study and use composite materials certainly won’t be excluded from the site, said his partner in the property, Will Goering.

But both men hope to widen the tenant roster. They feel that limiting tenants only to those who work with composite materials may have hurt the building in the past.

“There’s maybe 10,000 or 15,000 square feet of the building being used for composite technology currently,” Goering said. “I would anticipate a re-branding of the building itself, along with the redevelopment.”

The new owners bought the properties on Composite Drive and Forrer Boulevard for a total of $2.8 million in mid-July. It was sold from First Financial Collateral Inc., of Carmel, Ind. — which acquired the property from the composites center in 2015 after a failed auction — to an entity called “2000 Composite LLC.”

The site includes more than 196,000 square feet suitable for manufacturing, as well as a nearly 50,000-square-foot enclosure. There are perhaps a half-dozen tenants there today, including the University of Dayton Research Institute.

The new owners note that Synchrony Financial is having success in a very similar building, just next door to the former composite center in the Kettering Business Park. Synchrony has more than 1,700 Kettering employees, many of them call center workers.

So the new owners are open to some kind of call center operation at the former composite center. It could also be office or light industrial, McCarthy said.