Developer scraps plans to remodel tech center

A developer has scrapped plans to remodel the former BMC West Building Materials Center on Fairview Avenue into the first of three buildings in a high-tech Boise office development.
The Fairview Tech Center is “dead,” Bill Ditz of Mountain West Group LLC, Eagle, reported last week. Financing could not be finalized in time to make the plan a reality, he said.
Now the former BMC West building is under contract with an undisclosed buyer, said Mike Keller of Thornton Oliver Keller Commercial Real Estate. “Nothing is finalized,” he said, declining to elaborate.
The building of 24,884 square feet is on 8 acres on the south side of Fairview near Curtis Road.
The $9 million Fairview Tech Center, as planned last fall, would have included the remodeled BMC West Building plus buildings of 27,000 and 28,000 square feet to be added later. Buildings were to have high power-supply capabilities, and the site was to be landscaped extensively.
“Obviously, errors were made,” said Ditz, a 25-year veteran of the commercial real estate business. “I’ll get beyond this and regroup.”
“In the beginning I was clearly in the hunt for some investment capital,” Ditz said “The way the project shook out, I needed about $3 million in equity. I had been trying to go to the institutional market to get that equity.”
Smaller investment companies and high-net-worth families are among typical providers of financing in the $1 million-to-$5 million range, he said. “That’s where I needed to do a much better job of seeking them out and finding them.”
To acquire the BMC West property at the attractive price the seller was offering, Ditz and Mountain West Group had a somewhat shorter time period in which to secure funding before the property was placed back on the market. A potential backer decided not to participate in Fairview West at a higher price.
Ditz said he has been trying to bring to Boise an investment-capital partner “who has the same level of confidence in the market that I do to grow a portfolio of investment projects, because that’s where Boise is heading.”
He cited several more buildings W.H. Moore Co. plans in Boise (IBR, 3-5-01) and Silverstone – an office development planned by Blackeagle Business Center developer Sundance Co. in southeast Meridian (IBR, 12-4-00).
BMC West moved its building materials center to Franklin Road near Eagle Road. Its parent is the publicly traded Building Materials Holding Corp.