Developer Greg Geis hopes to wrap up financing deals in November and push for an opening just a year later. The Geis Cos., a family of companies based in Streetsboro, bought the buildings in February.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The buyer of the former Ameritrust complex has inked a deal with Marriott to bring an Autograph Collection hotel to East Ninth Street, as part of a project that includes 205 apartments, a grocery store, a Euclid Avenue rooftop bar and an indoor dog park.
Developer Greg Geis hopes to wrap up financing deals in November and push for an opening just a year later. That's an aggressive schedule for an undertaking that involves three historic buildings and carries, if you include the new Cuyahoga County headquarters at East Ninth and Prospect Avenue, a $250 million price tag.
The Ameritrust complex, now called "The 9."A painful vacancy at one of downtown Cleveland's key corners, the complex -- which Geis recently started calling "The 9" -- could become a hub of activity, teeming with renters, shoppers and visitors. If the Geis Cos. are successful, the project won't just pay off for its investors. It will shore up a long-troubled intersection and help bolster the case for remaking other vacant or near-empty buildings nearby.
"This was the heart of our financial district, and it's an area with severe blight," said Tracey Nichols, the city's economic development director. "I think this project will do a couple things. It will show people that we can get the funding, we can get projects done and we can get them leased up. That's important for attracting funding to other projects."
The 9, at a glance
The $250 million project at East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue will include:Tower
Eight months after buying the buildings from Cuyahoga County, Geis is ready to reveal what he and his brother, Fred, are planning.
The 29-story tower will become the Metropolitan, an independent hotel affiliated with Marriott's Autograph Collection. The 156-room hotel, on the tower's lower floors, will include a lobby bar, a fitness center and a spa. Floor plans show large rooms and suites -- some, at 650 square feet, twice the size of a typical hotel room.
"It's iconic," said Tom Conran of Greenwood Hospitality Group, a Colorado-based hotel management company that will operate the Metropolitan. "The artwork, the furnishings, they'll all tie back to the iconic nature of this building and the bank building next door ... We just believe that the experience of this hotel will be that much different than anything else downtown."
The tower's upper floors will house 105 apartments, including expansive units that Geis is willing to let his tenants customize. One would-be renter already asked about leasing the entire 28th floor, roughly 11,000 square feet.
In a downtown market where apartment occupancy is near 97 percent and rents are creeping up, Geis is setting the floor at $1,600 a month for the smallest unit, 821 square feet. That puts rents around $2 per square foot, a level some landlords recently reached in University Circle but much higher than what many downtown buildings charge.
"There are currently no true luxury apartments in the city," said Geis, who plans to offer tenants access to hotel services, dog-walking and valet parking.
More apartments will fill most of the 13-story Swetland Building on Euclid Avenue. Above offices and a Heinen's grocery store, which also is leasing two floors in the neighboring historic Rotunda, the apartments will be smaller than their tower counterparts and aimed at hospitality workers.
Forty of the apartments will offer lower rents -- $625 a month for a 500-square-foot unit, say, instead of $1,000 -- for people who work in the hotel, restaurants and Heinen's store. A function of the financing, which includes tax credits meant to revive low-income areas, the subsidized apartments also reflect the Geis family's longtime commitment to supporting employees.
"It's going to be a little bit of a frat house," Geis said of Swetland, "but properly managed, people like to be with their contemporaries and not have to leave the building to go to work."
Other pieces of the project include a sun deck and bar, on top of the Swetland; a Mediterranean restaurant with a large patio on East Ninth; and a New York Style-deli at the northwest corner of the old Ameritrust garage, facing the county's eight-story headquarters building. A 2,000-square-foot dog park, open to apartment residents and hotel guests, will fill part of the 29th floor.
Geis likes superlatives and will list all the firsts, biggests and bests he expects to achieve.
Here's one more: The project has the distinction of pulling in more state historic preservation tax credits than any other in Ohio. Between the tower, the Rotunda and Swetland, the complex qualified for $26.9 million in credits -- an essential piece of a puzzle that, otherwise, wouldn't have been solvable.
With support from the Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corp., Cuyahoga County applied for and received the valuable state credits in 2008, before the state limited awards to $5 million per building and barred government entities from competing. The county, which once planned to demolish the tower and remake the whole site, eventually sold the buildings to Geis and managed to pass along the credits.
The K&D Group, another local developer who kicked the tires on Ameritrust, secured historic recognition for the tower before walking away from the project during the recession. That lucky set of circumstances made it possible for Geis and Sandvick Architects, a historic consultant on the project, to amend the state tax credit application, boosting the total award as the brothers planned to renovate, rather than raze, the tower.
Cuyahoga County's original plan qualified for just under $2 million in credits. The Geis redevelopment qualifies for a whopping $26.9 million. The renovations also are eligible for federal tax credits for historic preservation.
The financing stack looks likely to include $30 million in federal New Markets Tax Credits, which spur investments in low-income areas. Those credits would flow through U.S. Bank, Consortium America, the Ohio Finance Fund and Cleveland Development Advisors, an affiliate of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the local chamber of commerce.
"This is the epitome of a transformational project," said Yvette Ittu, who leads Cleveland Development Advisors. "This is definitely going to improve the market for residential along that Ninth and Euclid area which will help, again, to set the market so that more retail and residential can start to be developed from Ninth to PlayhouseSquare. On our scale of catalytic, this would definitely rise to the top."
The city has approved a low-interest loan, of up to $6 million, using federal money to support retail and office portions of the project. Cleveland also signed off on tax increment financing, which taps part of the increased property-tax value created by a project to help pay for construction.
Huntington Bank is leading two groups of conventional lenders who will provide a construction loan and short-term financing to cover gaps until the tax credits come through. And the developer, who views the project as a long-term investment, is throwing in cash.
That layer cake of debt and equity doesn't include Cuyahoga County's headquarters building, which was financed separately through bonds issued by the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority.
"It's coming together really fast," Ryan Terrano, a senior vice president with Huntington, said of the rehabilitation project. "There are a lot of deals downtown that have tried to get off the ground and have been taking three, four, five years. These guys are pushing it, and they're getting it done. In my opinion, they're cramming three years of development in, from February when they bought this thing to when we're hoping to get everything closed, within 60 days."