One of downtown Scranton’s largest buildings, the former Globe Store, is available for sale or lease as the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce launches an aggressive marketing program to fill the historic structure.
Officially known as the MetroTech Center since the chamber’s Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Building Co. purchased it in the late 1990s, the 255,000-square-foot building went dark this summer when Diversified Information Technologies/EDM Americas relocated to Moosic.
The chamber published a brochure for the building and expects to market it through personal meetings with executives, real estate professionals and site selection consultants, said Amy Luyster, vice president of the Scranton Plan, the chamber’s marketing arm.
Through cooperation with the Penn’s Northeast regional marketing group and the Governor’s Action Team, the property will reach an even broader potential audience. The chamber has also been collaborating with city and county officials on getting the word out. Chamber officials will feature the building at trade shows they attend.
For now, she said, no one has shown an interest in the building as the national economy turns a corner, but the local economy lags. The area continues to have the highest unemployment rate among Pennsylvania’s metro areas and Scranton city government is mired in a financial crisis.
City government’s financial crisis and taxation inequity with other regions could be outweighed by the property’s features, she said.
“We have no control over the city’s situation,” she said. “But what we can say is this will be the perfect building for the right users.”
The building is historic, Ms. Luyster noted, yet the interior has modern offices and amenities — although some portions of the building used for storage remain unfinished. The downtown is vibrant and offers many amenities. Parking is available at the contiguous parking garage. The building is within two hours of Philadelphia and New York City.
John Cognetti of Hinerfeld Commercial Real Estate in Scranton said while the market for office space is rebounding, demand for central business district office space lags. He described the building as a hybrid, with finished and unfinished space, making it difficult to imagine what sort of single user it would attract.
“The end user could be a business that needs a lot of space, a sort of business that we can’t even think of right now,” he said. “It could end up as a mixed use — maybe even apartments.”
Whatever the outcome, he hopes the new user will use the Penn Avenue side of the building, which has been sealed and dark for more than a decade – hurting, he believes, development in that area.
Ms. Luyster said the chamber isn’t targeting any specific type of business, sector or use.
Contact the writer:
dfalchek@timesshamrock.com
