Commercial Property in Fort Wayne

As many of you know my wife and I are expanding our business. We currently operate our business out of our home; however, it has grown to a point that we need a larger location. We have been looking at commercial property since January.

We have looked at a lot of local property listings including:
1. A couple of houses that we would convert into commercial property.
2. Existing commercial property.
3. Constructing a new building.

We had the following criteria:
1. It had to be within 5 miles of the intersection of Coldwater and Dupont.
2. We had to be able to purchase the property rather then lease it.
3. We did not want to be landlords. In other words we wanted to purchase just the space we would use.
4. The office had to have a receptionist area, a small lobby, a conference room, six offices, a storage room, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. We expected the office to be about 2000 square feet.
5. We wanted to move into the office in 2007 or 2008.

We expected to find an existing commercial property and we expected to purchase it.

Most of the properties on the north side of Fort Wayne are for lease rather then for sale. This was a rather large problem. Most of the properties for sale were only for sale if you bought the entire building and were willing to be a landlord for the rest of the building.

Believe it or not, we have found that we can build a brand new "office condo" (The developer is building a building and we are buying about 30% of it) for about the same price as purchasing an existing property.

So we will be signing a contract tomorrow and plan on moving into our "office condo" on December 3rd, 2007.

This illustrates both a strength and a weakness of Fort Wayne.

Strength:

Land is inexpensive in Fort Wayne and it is easy to build.

Weakness:

It is so cheap to buy property and build that there is absolutely no reason for developers to "infill" Fort Wayne. This has resulted in a large city that has horrible "urban sprawl."

Mike Sylvester