3
By Marty Finley – Reporter, Louisville Business First
Jul 3, 2019, 11:46am EDT
An East End shopping center owner and apartment developer is bringing more than 300 new units to the market.
Louisville-based Hagan Properties Inc. has revised its plans for the Middletown Station Shopping Center on Shelbyville Road to include a 326-unit apartment complex dubbed The Station @ Middletown.
Hagan has proposed construction of the complex on 11 acres at 12975 Shelbyville Road, west of the shopping center’s Target store. The site is zoned for commercial use, and the company owns the property through its Middletown Partners LLC affiliate.
According to a site plan filed with Louisville Metro Planning & Design Services, the complex would have four four-story buildings that total nearly 100,000 square feet. The complex would house a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom units.
Three of the buildings each would house 88 to 94 units, and a smaller building would have 52 units. A large pool and amenity area also are proposed on the site.
The plans do not disclose the size of the apartments or anticipated lease rates for the complex. Wendy Hagan, a principal with Hagan Properties, said the firm is planning an urban-style design she believes will appeal to modern renters that do not want to carry the financial obligation of owning a home and prefer the flexibility renting offers.
“As the demand for this type of product has increased, retailers that traditionally prohibited multi-family from co-tenanting with them now aggressively court these renters and encourage developers to incorporate multi-family into their developments,” Hagan said by email. “Furthermore, retailers are modifying their prototypes from future stores so that multi-family can be built above their stores.”
Hagan Properties is working with the Louisville office of Nashville-based architecture, engineering and interior design firm Gresham, Smith and Partners as project engineer and Charlotte-based Axiom Architecture as project architect.
Costs for the development were not disclosed.
Middletown Station shopping center has more than 500,000 square feet and is anchored by the Target and a Walmart store. Other tenants there include Feeders Supply, Buffalo Wild Wings, Norton Healthcare Inc., Bassett Furniture and McAlister’s Deli.
“The supply of desirable retailers to fill out this 10-acre site is very limited, if any,” Hagan said in the email. “For these reasons, we feel that what we are proposing is the most appropriate use of this site.”
Hagan Properties also owns Shelbyville Road Plaza, which counts Trader Joe’s, Nordstrom Rack and Nike among its major tenants.
In addition to its shopping center portfolio, the company previously developed the 356-unit 9910 Sawyer Apartments, which backs up to E.P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park, and is constructing the 470-unit Victory Knoll Apartments, which is costing more than $60 million to develop at the northeast corner of Interstate 64 and Blankenbaker Parkway on Ellingsworth Lane.
Recently, Hagan Properties expanded into the self-storage business with the 150,000-square-foot Winchester Acres Self-Storage next to Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant on Chamberlain Lane.
Louisville’s apartment market has been booming over the last few years, with several dozen apartment complexes being greenlit in Louisville and Southern Indiana. And there’s no immediate sign of a slowdown as local and out-of-state developers are pouring hundreds of millions of new investment into new construction and redevelopments of older commercial properties into apartments.
Project Watch, Louisville Business First’s interactive map of active commercial development projects, is currently tracking nearly 50 local multifamily projects that are either proposed or under construction.