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May 14, 2019

’All-Star’ developers not lost in space

PHOTO | New Haven Biz SIOR panelists (l-r) Winstanley, Scinto, Fowler and Lescalleet in Wallingford Friday.
By Michael C. Bingham

What is the state of the commercial real-estate market in Connecticut in 2019? The answer depends largely on which sub-market your company does business in.

That was the consensus of an “All-Star Developers Panel” convened by the Connecticut/Western Massachusetts chapter of the Society of Industrial & Office Realtors (SIOR).

The get-together took place Friday at the Farm Country Club in Wallingford and was attended by about 80 mostly commercial realtors as well as lenders, investors and other developers.

Panelists included Tim Lescalleet, senior vice president of Griffin Industrial LLC, the real estate operating subsidiary of publicly traded Griffin Industrial Realty Inc. Headquartered in Windsor, the company has developed more than 4 million square feet of primarily warehousing and distribution space on land holdings totaling some 4,000 acres in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Connecticut’s location is a selling point in the warehousing and distribution sub-market, Lascalleet said — “ground zero [for wholesalers and retailers] serving New England and upstate New York,” he said. That “270 [compass] degrees of distribution is why companies like Walgreens, Trader Joe’s and Dollar Tree chose Connecticut” to site warehousing and distribution facilities. By contrast, New England’s only major city — Boston — “is more of a [distribution] terminus,” he explained.

The office sub-market is the niche that R.D. Scinto Inc. has exploited successfully over two decades — especially its home town on Shelton. According to President and Chief Operating Officer Rob Scinto (son of the company’s founder and namesake), the Shelton and lower Valley office market is nowhere near saturation — at least not yet. Scinto was also a panelist at the event.

Scinto’s portfolio has grown to 4.5 million square feet of primarily office space — that includes four new buildings opened for occupancy in the last 12 months and two facilities currently under construction in Shelton. The company’s office buildings are at present 99-percent occupied — “We’re turning away tenants,” Scinto said.

Headquartered in South Norwalk but having “planted a big flag in New Haven” is Clay Fowler, chairman and CEO of Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, which is engaged in nearly a quarter-billion dollars in projects in the Elm City. Spinnaker specializes “primarily in residential [development] — but residential today means mixed-use,” Fowler explained.

Fowler’s biggest Elm City project to date, Audubon Square, fits that description — a “mini-city” bounded by Audubon, Orange, State and Grove streets that will house 269 Apartments, a 700-plus-space parking garage and some 5,000 square feet of street-level retail.

Now, Fowler is negotiating to take over the lead role in redeveloping the former Veterans Memorial Coliseum site from the financially struggling original preferred developer, the Montreal-based LiveWorkLearnPlay (LWLP). When the city originally signed a deal with LWLP six years ago, the project was envisioned as an urbanist mini-city comprising a $400 million mix of apartments, retail, offices and a hotel on the 5.5-acre block bounded by Orange, State and Grove streets and MLK Boulevard.

Little baby engines

Fowler’s attraction to doing deals here stems from his conviction that New Haven “is a real place — one of only two cities in Connecticut,” said Fowler, purposely discounting Bridgeport and Stamford. “We believe in Connecticut as a whole,” he added. “New England has only one big engine, in Boston,” he added. “Connecticut has little baby engines” — of which New Haven is the most promising, he added.

Another non-New Haven company which has likewise “planted a flag” here is Boston-based Winstanley Enterprises, represented Friday by co-founder (with brother Carter) Adam Winstanley. “Every five to seven years we reinvent ourselves,” Winstanley said of his company, whose initial entrée into Connecticut was developing multi-story office properties, most of which it later sold.

Today Winstanley’s New Haven projects are primarily in medical and life sciences, most involving Yale-incubated companies and most concentrated in a single block at 25 Science Park. Winstanley cited his company’s “strong relationship with Yale” — a relationship made stronger when the university agreed to lease roughly half of the 14-story former Alexion Pharmaceuticals headquarters at 100 College Street.

“At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what asset class you’re in,” Winstanley said, “as long as you’re good at what you do.”

Contact Michael C. Bingham at mbingham@newhavenbiz.com

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