Square 46, the Mid City mixed-use development that is home to White Star Market, is up for sale with an asking price of $5 million.
Developers Josh Hoffpauir, John Meek and David Faulk decided to list the 25,000-square-foot property late last year, according to real estate broker Ben Graham of Stirling Properties, who is handling the listing.
Hoffpauir acquired the property, then a vacant slab formerly the site of Giamanco’s Restaurant, in December 2014 for $750,000. It is unclear how much he and his partners spent developing it.
The 1.3-acre property’s asking price averages to a little more than $169 per square foot, and includes more than 10,000 square feet of retail space, 6,700 square feet of office space and 8,000 square feet of residential space comprising eight, two-bedroom units that were developed as condos but are currently being offered for lease.
“They went out there and took a swing and did a great job on the project as a whole,” Graham says. “It’s beautiful, it’s quality and it’s just going to get better.”
When it opened in late spring 2018, Square 46 was heralded as an example of the Mid City renaissance underway along Government Street, and its anchor tenant, White Star Market, has proved successful over the past two years, despite some turnover among the food hall tenants.
Other elements of Square 46 have struggled, however. Virtually all of the office space is currently available for lease at a rate of some $22 per square foot, after Hoffpauir, who initially located his office there, moved out last fall.
Some 1,900-square-feet of retail space is also now available, as craft retailer Board and Brush, which opened in summer 2019, has decided to close.
“Their issue is they live in Lafayette and the realities of operating a business from 50 miles away was a little more than what they were expecting,” Graham says. “But we’ve had a ton of interest in that space because it’s built out.”
Another 1,100-square-foot retail space was never occupied, though Graham says he has signed a lease with a national tenant and hopes to announce new plans for the space in the coming days.
The eight residential units, meanwhile, which were developed as condos, are currently being offered for lease after unsuccessful attempts to sell them individually. Graham says the decision to lease the two-bedroom, two-bathroom units as condos came in the last few weeks.
“I think if they had started out leasing the condos they would have leased quickly,” he says.
