NEWS RELEASE - March 12, 2018
Patrick Dowd, Vice President of Sequoia Realty Corp, brokered the sale of 7501 Carnegie Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio to Cleveland Food Hub. When Sequoia lists a property for sale, they take a multi-faceted approach to marketing including networking within the broker community. Through this networking it was Eliot Kijewski of Cushman & Wakefield | CRESCO Real Estate who was able to secure a buyer for the property.
The 7501 Carnegie property, which features 137,670 square feet of temperature-controlled food grade space, is located in Cleveland’s resurging MidTown district (this is Sequoia’s second significant transaction in Midtown in a month having represented the buyer at 4020 Payne.) The new facility, purchased by entrepreneurs Gordon Priemer and Eric Diamond, will house their innovative new venture, the Cleveland Food Hub. The Food Hub will house tenants including their existing Cleveland Culinary Launch and Kitchen (CCLK), currently located at 2800 Euclid Avenue. CCLK was formed in 2018 to help launch or grow local food businesses by offering fully equipped shared commercial kitchen space, business support, classes and workshops, mentorship and networking opportunities. The new facility will not only house the incubator, but also offer manufacturing, food co-packing, and warehousing for local craft food entrepreneurs. Additionally, there will be retail space along Carnegie. Tenants who are already signed on for the space include Souper Market and Cleveland Bagel – two local favorites.
Finding the right buyer for a specialized facility such as this is not always a simple task. After a year of working with another commercial realtor, Greg Fritz, President of Produce Packaging, Inc. turned to Patrick Dowd with Sequoia to sell the 7501 Carnegie property. “Patrick and Sequoia did a terrific job,” stated Fritz. “They generated a lot of activity and got a lot of potential buyers to visit our facility.”
Among the potential buyers, Dowd and Kijewski found a match with Priemer and Diamond’s Food Hub. “The experience was absolutely great,” Diamond explained, “Patrick [Dowd] from Sequoia could not have been more responsive or professional. It was this attitude that allowed this somewhat complex transaction to move to completion. Both he and Eliot [Kijewski] worked incredibly hard on this deal.”
The hard work on the part of all parties has paid off. Construction on the facility is well underway and the first tenants are set to move in on May 1.