Bigger inside
Finishing basement gives Edmond office building twice the space
Derek Turner doubled the square footage of a building in Edmond without adding to its footprint.
EDMOND — Here’s a doubly different kind of redevelopment:
The office building at 200 N Bryant Ave. will have twice the space on the inside — with no increase in its footprint.
All developer Derek Turner had to do was finish work started 26 years ago: the 22,000-square-foot walk-out basement that was left in dirt in 1992 and never completed.
That’s how he and other investors now have a 44,000-square-foot office building for lease, and with an elevator finally installed in the never-used elevator shaft. There’s more parking, too, to accommodate more client traffic.
“I think they just never finished it out,” said Turner, president of Turner & Co. “I’m not sure what their plans were, but they never finished it out. They were using it for storage. They moved all that storage and it was just a giant, blank dirt canvas.”
The new space will allow probably 10 general office tenants, broker Jonathan Thompson said. Just two were in the building previously, a physician and a clinic. Medical tenants are still welcome, he said, but the aim is to diversify.
The building and three others across the metro area sold as a $20.15 million portfolio two years ago to the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents, which soon spun off 200 N Bryant.
Thompson said the investors have more than $7 million in the project, about half of it in improvements.
How much the owners paid for it couldn’t immediately be determined, but $5 million in improvements are going into it, county records show.
Full-service lease rates range from $22 to $26 per square foot per year on the main floor and from $16 to $19 on the basement level.
The building is on the east side of Bryant, north of Second Street and OU Medical Center Edmond. More noticeable to passersby than the built-out walkout basement will be upgrades to the exterior, which was solid lightorange brick.
“Originally, it was just a brick exterior. We went back and put two different types of material on here to add to the look of the building,” said Harrison Turner, Derek’s son and commercial project manager. “Instead of just painting the brick, which a lot of people do, we decided to change the elevation.
“We added parapet walls and raised the elevation height of the building. We added this material called Trespa that looks like multicolored
reclaimed wood, as well as another product by AFL that looks like concrete cladding on the outside of the building. We gave it a new updated look.”