Michael Block sees the 4.39 acres of land in downtown Kansas City as a prime opportunity, perhaps for a new apartment or condominium building.
And Block, principal with Kansas City-based Block Real Estate Services, expects the parcel to generate plenty of interest from developers eager to build in an area of Kansas City’s bustling downtown designed to be a true live/work/play community.
The 4.39-acre parcel located in Hallmark Cards’ Crown Center complex, where Grand Boulevard joins with 27th Street and Warwick Trafficway, is far from an ordinary piece of land, Block said.
“This is a great infill site,” Block said. “It’s what developers are looking for today. The land has been underutilized for a long time. Opportunities like this, in a great development like the Crown Center, don’t come along every day.”
Block and Block Real Estate Services associate Keiten Nuspl are managing the listing. The asking price for the land is set at more than $9.5 million, or $50 a square foot.
The parcel, in addition to its ideal location, features flat terrain and centralized utilities. Because of this, the land is already primed for development, Block said.
The owner of the land at 27th and Grand also owns a 5.77-acre contiguous parcel of land in the Crossroads Arts District of downtown Kansas City. This land is located primarily between the city’s downtown core and the Crown Center mixed-use development.
This is important for whoever purchases the 4.39-acre parcel at 27th and Grand. As Block says, the Crossroads district, which was once filled with older, loft-style warehouses, has been rejuvenated. It is now a bustling area filled with offices, multifamily buildings, restaurants and shops.
The Crown Center development, home to Hallmark Card’s international headquarters, is bustling, too. It ranks as one of the first mixed-use developments in the country, and the 85-acre development attracts more than 5 million visitors every year.
Whoever buys the newly available slice of land, then, will be situated in a prime spot between these two busy areas, Block said. This makes it an ideal site for a multifamily building, he added.
“In Crown Center, you have offices. You have hotel rooms. You have a whole retail complex,” Block said. “There’s an ice rink there and a Hall’s department store. The parcel that we are marketing is a great opportunity for someone who wants to develop in the middle of all this activity.”
It’s rare that a slice of land in the Crown Center will be developed not by Hallmark but by an outside developer, Block said.
The site does have a building sitting on it, a warehouse space. For years, the land has been used simply for the warehouse and parking.
With a multifamily building, though? That land will seamlessly connect to the Crown Center and Crossroads areas, Block said.
“That is what developers are looking for from across the country,” Block said. “They want to come in, repurpose a space, redevelop it. They want to go vertical and create a project with great value. They can do that here.”