Centurion Stone is adding 50 jobs at its new plant near John C. Tune Airport — freeing its current home north of downtown for potential redevelopment.
A nearly 50-year-old Nashville stone company has put its huge riverfront property up for sale, as it prepares to add 50 jobs in an expansion to a much larger headquarters.
GERMANTOWN
The ownership of Centurion Stone has newly listed its 12-acre Germantown property on the market with Nashville’s Urban Grout Commercial Real Estate. No asking price is listed, but Centurion’s ownership stands to command a high price reflective of the surge of construction sweeping through the neighborhood immediately north of downtown. To underscore the point, next to the Centurion property is where Atlanta developer TriBridge Residential is under construction on a $65 million project featuring apartments and a trio of restaurants from noted Atlanta chef Ford Fry (the gallery with this story shows other nearby activity as well).
Nearly 3,000 apartments and condos are proposed, underway or newly opened in Germantown, a jolt of building spurred in part by the presence of the 2-year-old stadium of the Nashville Sounds minor-league baseball team. The new listing of the Centurion Stone property, announced Monday, could induce yet another project to surface. The listing will serve as a new test of investors’ appetite to buy into Nashville at top-of-the-market prices, at a time when some other developers and banks have hit pause to see how the development boom shakes out.
“Nashville is executing a planning strategy to enliven the Cumberland River with greenways, neighborhood connectivity, and development that brings people to the waterfront. So, we are excited to see an industrial riverfront site like the Centurion Stone parcel be made available for redevelopment and look forward to working with future developers on their vision for the site,” Doug Sloan, executive director of the Metro Planning Department, said in a statement.
The property is zoned for industrial use, which means any buyer seeking to redevelop it would need Metro Council’s approval for a zoning change. Public records indicate Centurion Stone’s ownership of the property dates to the late 1990s.
Not only is the property surrounded by other projects in the works, the long-term views across the Cumberland River could wind up being quite different. Topgolf International Inc. is opening one of its trendy entertainment complexes this fall, which can be seen from the Centurion Stone property on a bluff above the river. Also directly across the river, Chicago-based Monroe Investment Partners has proposed a massive mixed-use development called River North — which, if it happens, would transform the industrial East Bank. A proposed pedestrian bridge that would span the river would connect to Germantown one block from the Centurion Stone property.
Centurion Stone’s growth also is part of the news here. The company employs 220 people today and plans to immediately hire 50 more concurrent with its move to a facility near John C. Tune Airport. At the beginning of next year, Centurion Stone will begin operating from the nearly 300,000-square-foot manufacturing plant on that site — a facility that is more than double the company’s space in Germantown. Company owner and CEO Tim Pardue said he expects at least a 30 percent boost in production from the new site, which he purchased late last year for $4.25 million.
Original Source: Adsam Sichko – Senior Report for Nashville Business Journal Nashville Business Journal