As seen in Bloomberg Businessweek: Welcome to SubTropolis

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As seen in Bloomberg: Welcome to SubTropolis

Welcome to SubTropolis: The Massive Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City
More than 1,000 people spend their workdays in SubTropolis, an industrial park housed in an excavated mine the size of 140 football fields
By Patrick Clark, February 4, 2015 

About 10 percent of Kansas City’s commercial real estate is underground, says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Landlords have made a cottage industry out of underground industrial space, thanks to rock formations near the Missouri River that allow trucks to drive into the old mines instead of tenants needing to use elevators to get things in and out.

The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for business in 1964 in an excavated mine below Kansas City, Mo., attracting tenants with the lure of lower energy costs and cheap rents. The walls, carved out of 270-million-year-old limestone deposits, help keep humidity low and temperatures at a constant 68 degrees, eliminating the need for air conditioning or heating. Tenants have reported saving as much as 70 percent on their energy bills, says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Rents run about $2.25 per square foot, about half the going rate on the surface. “It’s also a question of sustainability,” says Joe Paris, vice president at Paris Brothers, a specialty foods packager that employs about 200 workers underground. In addition to Paris Brothers, 51 tenants have rented nearly 6 million square feet of space. Others include LightEdge Solutions, a cloud computing company that uses the mild climate to help cool servers, and an underground archive that contains the original film reels to Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz.  Go to Bloomberg.com for more…

KCBJ Power 100: Ora Reynolds – President & CEO, Hunt Midwest

Ora Reynolds

Power 100: Ora Reynolds – President & CEO, Hunt Midwest
Kansas City Business Journal

Ora Reynolds and Hunt Midwest have been on a roll. Ford Motor Co.’s billion-dollar investment in its Kansas City Assembly Plant has also helped fill “Automotive Alley” at Hunt Midwest’s Subtropolis. Meanwhile, the company’s residential operation has benefited from housing’s bounce-back and the growing need for senior housing.

Reynolds has worked to build up her executive team after a record 2014. That should be a help to an executive who already put in huge efforts with area development organizations and (successfully) lobbying Missouri to offer incentives for data centers. Go to KCBJ.com for more…

Homebuilding in KC: A New Address

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Hunt Midwest – Homebuilding in Kansas City

The area’s next big residential area is about to rise from the dirt.
Austin Alonzo – Kansas City Business Journal

Construction is set to begin next year on the first housing developments in Kansas City’s Twin Creeks watershed. Roughly 13,000 acres in Platte and Clay counties are primed to transform from farm fields to new neighborhoods.

When built out — probably two decades from now — the Twin Creeks area will be a veritable city within a city. As many as 20,000 housing units — mostly single-family homes — eventually could be built in the area, possibly housing 85,000 new residents, said Alicia Stephens, executive director of the Platte County Economic Development Council.

“It’s the next high-growth area for Kansas City,” Stephens said. “Absolutely.”

The growth of the Twin Creeks area — framed by Interstate 435 to the north, U.S. Highway 169 to the east, Missouri Highway 152 to the south and Interstate 29 to the west — has been half a century in coming. Kansas City annexed the land in 1962, but it wasn’t primed for growth until the city began a more than $40 million project to build sewers in the area in 2012.

Work on the sewers is to be completed this year. Go to KCBJ.com for more…

In Kansas City, It’s the Rise of the Underground

SubTropolis is perfect for ecommerce, supply chain operations

Demand for Space Below Ground Is Increasing in Missouri; a Steady 65 Degrees
By Max Taves, November 26, 2014

It is easy to underestimate the size of the Kansas City, Mo., industrial real-estate market. That’s because a big chunk of it is hidden from sight — underground.

Occupying more than 21.8 million square feet, Kansas City’s industrial underground space—80 to 150 feet deep, in former limestone mines—is the largest in the U.S., comprising more than 7% of the metropolitan area’s total industrial area.

And demand for the space is growing, buoyed by resurgent manufacturing and expanding distribution centers seeking low-cost real estate requiring less energy to operate.

Next week, FoodServiceWarehouse.com, a restaurant-equipment supply company, will be moving into 475,000 square feet of space that sits more than 100 feet below the surface in a facility called SubTropolis, the largest underground industrial space in the U.S. Signed in May, FoodServiceWarehouse’s lease was the largest by square feet—above or below ground—in all of Kansas City last quarter and the second-largest this year, according to real-estate data firm CoStar Group Inc.

“It’s kind of what we call an underground city,” says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis owner Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development. SubTropolis has 8.2 miles of paved roads, 2.1 miles of railroad tracks, more than 500 truck docks, 1,600 parking spaces and 50 million square feet of space below ground. It’s 6 million square feet of leasable space is fully occupied by 55 companies and their 1,600 employees. Go to WSJ.com for more…