JLL Joins Team Developing $1B M-U Project in W. Va.

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

The developer of a 1,700-acre, $1.4 billion master-planned project in central West Virginia has recruited Jones Lang LaSalle to help push the development forward over the next decade, JLL announced last week.

The project, Charles Pointe, was set in motion by developer Genesis Partners, of Bridgeport, W.Va., and is West Virginia’s largest master-planned community and believed to be the largest multi-use development public-private partnership in the United States. Jones Lang LaSalle and Genesis Partners will serve jointly as project development manager and lead brokerage team for the project.

Charles Pointe, also in Bridgeport, is part of the state’s I-79 High-Tech Corridor, which is already home to oil and gas companies, federal agencies including NASA and the FBI (which employs about 2,500 personnel in the region), and life-science and other high-tech companies, as well as North Central West Virginia Airport, currently being expanded.

So far, Genesis Partners has developed more than 250,000 square feet of office and retail space, two hotels and a conference center, recreational facilities, educational facilities, community parks, and more than 200 residential units.

Still to come are:

•  Additional retail space, including several shopping centers and a “restaurant row”
•  A total of 660 guest rooms
•  Roughly 1,800 more housing units, a mix of multi-family and single-family at various price points
•  A 40-acre resort co-located with a conference/civic center complex
• A health/wellness facility
•  A baseball stadium and sports complex that will be home to local minor league baseball and hockey teams.

Infrastructure work at Charles Pointe began about 12 years ago, a JLL spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive, while preliminary planning for the development was in its early stages. Over the past decade, about 10 percent of the planned retail, residential, recreational and commercial vertical development has come to fruition. From today, Charles Pointe has an estimated 10-year horizon to complete buildout.

JLL was brought in at this point in the process, according to the spokesperson, because the completion of the site’s infrastructure “has coincided with the national economic recovery turning a corner” and because Genesis Partners was looking for additional development management, finance and brokerage capabilities as vertical development at Charles Pointe accelerates over the next few years.

“Charles Pointe has geography, infrastructure and demographics on its side,” Mike Elliott, the Jones Lang LaSalle brokerage team leader for Charles Pointe, told CPE. “People are already coming to the development from 30 to 60 minutes away, creating attractive demographic numbers for retailers, sports arenas and hotels. At the same time, corporations, particularly those in the energy and government service sectors, are attracted to this location and its highly redundant infrastructure.”