By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Herald Bulletin
lindsay.whitehurst@heraldbulletin.com
DALEVILLE — Filling 240,000 square feet of empty stores in Daleville is a tall order.
But Wednesday, the Virginia-based developer SugarOak Properties announced the deed is almost done.
They did it by repositioning the space as a business complex, the Heartland Business Center, rather than a retail center, touting the benefits of a close entrance to Interstate 69, low prices and a vast amount of space.
“I-69, exit 34. We go in and our customers go out,” said Van Smith, chairman of the board for Ontario Corp., the owner of Sherry Labs, a laboratory testing company and the first company to move into the center. “We can tell our customers in Manhattan or Chicago where to go. It’s handy for us.”
First Merchants Corp. and Boyce Forms/Systems both moved in to bring together all their operations in one place.
But will two established companies moving from Muncie hurt the economy there?
“It’s OK,” Delaware County Commissioner Tom Bennington said. “It’s good for Delaware County.”
Progressive Insurance, Hornerstone Financial Group, Two Men and a Truck, and Yomarie Bakery have also moved in.
Prime Outlets built the center in 1995 to house the Indiana Factory Shops.
“That was really the height of the outlet shopping market,” SugarOak’s Philip Nickles said. “They didn’t cut any corners (on construction).”
By 2003, though, many of the stores had pulled out. Prime sold the complex to SugarOak.
“When retail areas start to have some vacancy, the other stores tend to go as well,” Nickles said. “It was immediately clear this was not going to be an outlet mall again.”
The company considered making it a nursing home, but necessary improvements made it unworkable.
“We were about to buy (the center) inexpensively, and we wanted to keep that edge,” Nickles said.
By offering it as an industrial park, they could sell the space at a competitively low price, about $25 to $40 to buy or $4.50 to $6.50 to lease, as opposed to $100 a square foot to build, and allow companies to make any improvements they should need.
The Daleville Town Council got excited about the idea.
“We’ve never had anything this big, this many jobs in one place,” said Daleville Town Council President Steve Overmyer. The approximately 300 people working there now could grow to 500 in coming years. “I think this will keep people here. Now, they go to high school and disappear.”
Now, 2 1/2 years after SugarOak bought it, the complex is 80 percent full.
“It’s still a shock,” Overmyer said. “It happened so fast.”