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Downtown Media General building under contract

Posted at 10:23 AM, Apr 03, 2017
and last updated 2017-04-03 10:23:06-04

RICHMOND, Va. –For the first Richmond acquisition of his newly minted development arm, a longtime local construction executive is going big, eyeing a property he built for another firm nearly 20 years ago.

Hourigan Development, led by Hourigan Construction CEO Mark Hourigan and Joseph Marchetti III, is under contract to purchase the 125,000-square-foot former Media General headquarters building at 333 E. Franklin St.

The deal is expected to close in June and terms have not yet been disclosed. Marchetti declined to specify the purchase price. The building most recently was assessed at $10.7 million.

Hourigan is buying the property from Nexstar Media Group, which acquired Media General in a $4.6 billion deal earlier this year. That deal – announced in January 2016 – placed the combined headquarters of the two companies in Nexstar’s home of Irving, Texas, arousing speculation about what would become of Media General’s downtown headquarters. The company sold another downtown office building to VCU earlier that month.

“It’s been on our radar screen for a while,” Marchetti said Friday. “It is not every day that an institutional-quality building like this becomes available, so it’s been something we’ve been tracking.”

Marchetti said talks with Media General to buy the building began late last year. Hourigan Construction built the building for Media General in 1998, making the company keenly familiar with its potential, Hourigan said.

“When combined with our historical knowledge of the building, it made sense that this would be a great acquisition,” Hourigan said in a statement.

Marchetti said they plan to maintain the building as corporate office space, ideally for another large tenant that could fill the bulk of the building, though he said they are open to multiple smaller tenants. He said the now-former Media General still occupies the building and would maintain a presence there moving forward.

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