While it's true that the financial travails of the
Tasty Baking Company have been hogging the local financial headlines this past week, there's also a fair bit of good news brewing at the
Navy Yard in South Philly. During the first week of January, the
Liberty Property Trust development company along with
Synterra Partners, a small minority-owned landscaping firm, broke ground on two new flex buildings located just north of the two-year-old Tasty Baking factory. And there's a good chance that a third flex building will eventually be added to the mix. Together, the new buildings and the factory will comprise a 40 acre mini-campus known as the Navy Yard Commerce Center.
The project signifies not only good things for the Navy Yard's commercial real estate situation, but also a financial sea change for Liberty, which hadn't broken ground on a previous project since May 2009. And as for whether or not the two new flex buildings will prove to be successful enterprises, that's practically a given, according to Brian Cohen, Liberty Property Trust's VP of Development & Leasing. "Demand has been extremely robust, especially since the ground-breaking," he says. "And we're very hopeful that we'll be able to make more lease announcements in the coming months."
Potentially interested companies will certainly want to act soon, however, as a whopping 21 percent of the space has already been leased by
The Fretz Corp., a wholesaler of high-end kitchen appliances that plans to use part of their new space for manufacturing.
"This is what we hope is the start of the flex product within the city of Philadelphia," says Cohen. "We hope it'll help attract and retain those growing companies that otherwise--for lab space or light manufacturing or assembly--needed to go to the suburbs to find the right type of real estate."
Source: Brian Cohen, Liberty Property Trust
Writer: Dan Eldridge