Leveled best
Clipping a wing lets an old warehouse fly
No pain, no gain, they say. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, they say. That wing of this warehouse has to be torn down to make the warehouse work, Zach Martin said.
So, he had it torn down —16,500 square feet of industrial space at 16 S Pennsylvania Ave., leveled and gone. There was no pain, as it turned out, and no egg on his face when it was done. It worked. LSB Industries Inc .' sf ormer longtime corporate headquarters, nearly a city block in size, was transformed and backfilled.
Martin and Andrew Hwang, partners in Adept Commercial Real Estate, paid L SB $3,955,000 for buildings totaling 144,000 square feet on the 4.14-acre site two years ago. Publicly traded LSB — ticker symbol LXU on the New York Stock Exchange — which makes and sells agriculture, mining and industrial chemicals at several regional plants, moved its front office to Atrium Towers, 3503 NW 63.
The old property, mostly industrial with a little office space, is bounded on the north by W Sheridan Avenue, on the south by Oklahoma City Boulevard, on the east by S Virginia Avenue, and on the west by S Pennsylvania Avenue. Really bounded, as in restricted.
“The site had too much building and not enough parking, which is probably why we were able to buy it at a good deal,” Martin said. “What little parking we did have was a logjam of a mess in which you could hardly turn a car around.
“Last year, I made the hair-raising decision to demolish a 16,500-squarefoot wing of the building. In its place we built a parking lot, dock well and truck court complete with numerous overhead doors.
This was a counterintuitive move, as paying to reduce your square footage would generally be a bad idea. However, we had to sacrifice some of the square footage to make the rest of the campus work. It turned out to be a great move.”
The revamped warehouse space, 55,000 square feet, with new offices, bathrooms and conference rooms, was attractive to
Hurry Hub, a 10-year-old drop-shipping bu siness looking to move and expand from a 10,000-square-foot space a mile away at 1230 NW 5.
Hurry Hub processes
orders and ships products for online retailers, catalog distributors and brick-and-mortar businesses. Martin said Hurry Hub, like other e-commerce distributors, has grown this year, with so many people staying home because of the coronavirus and buying online rather than shopping in
stores.
In addition, ClimaCool Corp .,15 S Virginia, a former subsidiary of LSB, renewed a lease for 75,000 square feet of the warehouse space, also improved.
Two years ago, Martin said he thought breweries or medical marijuana growers, which were at
the time absorbing older industrial spaces, might come calling. But the vacant space was too big for just one brewery or one grower, he said, “and I really didn't want to cut it up into little spaces.”
He said clip ping that one wing did the trick: “The campus is once again 100% occupied.”