Burnside Burger King site sells for $2.2M
Daily Journal of Commerce
by Kennedy Smith
05/16/2007
It’s been an eyesore along West Burnside Street for more than three years now. It’s been a hangout for transients on the way to or from some of the social programs in Old Town/Chinatown. It’s boarded up and riffled with graffiti.
But the site of downtown’s old Burger King is primed for a facelift.
On April 26, developer Kevin Hepner bought the 4,398-square-foot building for $2.2 million.
Hepner is keeping his plans for the site a mystery. He bought the site under the limited partnership Broadway Burnside.
“The site’s got several different options right now,” Hepner, who will make an official announcement about his plans for the site next week, said. “I do have plans. I think it’s the best site in town.”
The 36-year-old developer has lived in Portland for 10 years. Most recently, he was a real estate representative for Jack in the Box for five years. He’s also broken ground on a 2.2-acre site at Southeast 174th Avenue and Division Street that formerly housed an Albertsons grocery and will be redeveloped as a Save-a-Lot store and drive-through Dutch Bros. coffee shop.
“He’s keeping a very tight lip on what he might do with this site,” Tom McDowell, a broker with Norris & Stevens Inc. who represented Hepner, said. “He’s being secretive.”
But the price Hepner paid for the property suggests he’ll do more than merely open another restaurant franchise.
Hepner has the power to “heal that corner,” Tim Eddy, principal at Hennebery Eddy Architects, said. “There’s no historic building there; there’s opportunity. And at $2.2 million, it’s unlikely that somebody is going to come in building a one- or two-story building.”
The site has been vacant since the Burger King restaurant closed in April 2004. Since September 2005, it’s been in the hands of Katsam LLC, a Seattle company that wanted to transform the former fast-food joint into a payday loan service. That company bought the property for $1.65 million.
However, the owner decided against the quick-cash company after the Oregon Legislature tightened regulations on cash advance companies, McDowell said.
Hepner had been interested in the building back then, so when it went back on the market he contacted Norris & Stevens again to work out a deal, McDowell said.
Prime location
The site, at 707 W. Burnside St., is zoned central commercial with a design overlay, according to the Bureau of Planning. A central commercial zoning designation with a design overlay is usually reserved for the city’s most densely populated, urban areas, according to Title 33 of Portland’s zoning code.
The site has a 6-to-1 floor-area ratio and can be built up to 350 feet. It sits in the Portland Development Commission’s Downtown Waterfront urban renewal area.
“It’s intriguing news,” Peter Englander, a planner with the PDC, said. “We have no idea, no sense of what the plans are, but the site has pretty sufficient zoning entitlements, and we would be very interested in seeing what plans a developer or property owner might have.”
From an urban design standpoint, the worst-case scenario would be to under-develop the site, Eddy said.
“Develop the site to its full potential,” he said. “That would be the ideal.”
The site is at a major crossroads in downtown, essentially marking east from west, and north from south. And, if plans for the Burnside-Couch couplet go through, the new development would have frontage on two major throughways, plus Broadway spanning north-south. The purchase also comes on the heels of Beam Development and Bill Naito Co.’s plans to redevelop up to half a million square feet in Old Town/Chinatown and Venerable Properties’ overhaul of the White Stag block at the foot of the Burnside Bridge.
All of Portland’s best-known developers had plenty of time to snatch up the site, Eddy, said, but they didn’t because “they’ve found other sites that are more desirable from an economic and risk standpoint.”
“The question is what the market will bring to that site, and the market has had a tough time of things,” he said. “What would be great to have there? A prominent landmark hotel, a nice tower on that corner. But will you get that? Is that the neighborhood that you could get that development in? We don’t know.”
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