YOUNGSTOWN – Chase Tower in downtown Youngstown will go on the auction block this month.
The 14-floor office building, which is owned by the Cleveland-based Frangos Group, will be auctioned online April 19 though 21, according to the Ten-X Commercial website.
USA Chase Building Youngstown LLC, the Frangos entity listed as the building’s owner, purchased the property for $775,000 in 2008.
The opening bid is set at $500,000, but there is “an unpublished reserve threshold to see exactly what if any the interest there will be,” says Lou Frangos, chairman of the Frangos Group.
For decades, Chase Bank – and the banking entities that preceded it – has occupied the building’s ground floor space. The building, however, is poised to lose that anchor tenant. In May, Chase is moving its downtown Youngstown office to the Realty Tower.
Constructed in 1928, the building at 6 Federal Plaza Central has a total rentable space of 128,741 square feet and gross square footage of 135,300 square feet. According to the Ten-X listing, 26% of the building is occupied.
The usable space includes the 12,000-square-foot bank space on the main floor, which features high ceilings and is accented with a series of mosaic panels, including some of past U.S. presidents.
Other spaces in the building range from 895 square feet to 8,765 square feet. Among the property’s features is its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
Absent a single user who would occupy five or six of the floors, a residential-office mix on the upper floors and potentially a restaurant might represent a path for success for the Chase Tower, according to Alex Jelepis, a commercial real estate agent for SVN Cleveland Corporate Realty Advisors, which has been tied to the property for several years.
“There seems to be pretty good momentum in downtown Youngstown,” he says.
Because the downtown office market has shrunk so much, millions of square feet – upward of 80% of the Class C space – in downtown Cleveland, has been converted to residential space, Jelepis notes. The Chase Tower here has windows on all four sides that are ideal for residential units, he adds.
The “massive banking hall,” with its mezzanine, tall ceilings and other features, “should be a Cameron Mitchell steakhouse or something like that,” he says. “I can see it being repurposed for that.”
Pictured: Opening bid is set at $500,000 but that could change depending on interest.