Hubbell brings an old office building to life
KENT DARR Sep 5, 2018 | 9:02 pm
2 min read time
478 wordsAll Latest News, Real Estate and Development
 Hubbell Realty Co. has rehabbed a four-story office building that has served single tenants for most of its 55 years into a contemporary, multi-tenant property.
In its day, the four-story building with a sandstone skin stood out at the intersection of Fleur Drive and Bell. Though an institutional grade structure with big name occupants — Allied Insurance Co. once had offices there — it had become easy to miss.
As with many current office rehabs, the building at 1963 Bell Ave. has the millennial worker in mind with an airy collaboration room with high-tech gadgetry; a common area with fitness center, break room and individual teleconference rooms; a rooftop patio; and a lobby that features a flat-screen monitor that can be rolled up like a large map of the city. One feature Hubbell didn’t need to add was a four-story atrium that streams sunshine through all four floors. Iowa Finance Authority will be the first tenant, moving in at the start of 2019 to all of the 44,000 square feet the second floor has to offer. The first floor provides another 40,382 square feet of office space, and the third floor has 22,999. On each floor, offices can be as small as 5,000 square feet. Tenants get the additional benefit of a 10-year sliding scale tax abatement on building improvements, said Hubbell Senior Vice President Steve Niebuhr, who led the rehab project. Hubbell worked with now-retired architect Bryan Shiffler in imagining new spaces in an old building that would help tenants recruit workers. The setting isn’t bad. The building is on 10 acres with a big view of the downtown skyline and Gray’s Lake. A bike trail passes nearby. Of course, there will be access to food trucks. The project represents a change of pace for Hubbell. In the last week of 2016, Hubbell was wrapping up its 160th year and turning a corner it hadn’t approached in a decade — the purchase and rehab of an aging office building. In late December of that year, the firm’s commercial brokerage, CBRE|Hubbell Commercial, had a client that was anxious to get a building it didn’t need off the books. At the same time, Hubbell Realty was ready to try something outside of building new apartments and rehabbing old warehouses into multifamily housing in downtown Des Moines. The client was Wells Fargo Financial and the building was the property at 1963 Bell that Wells Fargo had owned twice over the years. It was time to unload the building, built in the 1960s as the headquarters of Farmland Mutual Insurance Co. The last time Hubbell had bought office property was 2006, when it bought the Century I and II office buildings in West Des Moines. Those properties were sold in 2013. 1963 Bell is being marketed by Riley Hogan and Tyler Dingel of CBRE|Hubbell Commercial. |
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