A longtime developer is pursuing the fifth and final piece of the Gateway medical office complex in Glastonbury that’s been built out over the past 13 years.
David Sessions, owner of Avon-based Casle Corp., has agreed to purchase 4.8 acres of town-owned vacant and wooded land on the western edge of the currently 31-acre Gateway park, and has applied for approvals to build two medical office buildings totaling more than 45,000 square feet in size on the plot, according to a recent application reviewed last week by planning and zoning officials.
The larger of the two buildings would be 30,500 square feet with two stories, while the second would be 15,000 square feet on one floor.
In an interview Thursday, Sessions estimated that the overall value of the project could be between $10 million and $12 million.
The buildings would be located on the south side of Western Boulevard, and would add to 10 others Casle has built at Gateway, in four separate phases, since 2007.
Healthcare Trust of America (HTA), a publicly traded Arizona-based real estate investment trust, acquired Gateway’s earlier phases in 2016 as part of a $178 million deal that included approximately a dozen medical office projects developed by Casle, many of them in Greater Hartford.
Tenants at Gateway include large area healthcare players such as Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, ProHealth Physicians, Orthopedic Associates of Hartford, and Women’s Health CT.
Sessions says he doesn’t yet have any tenants secured for the proposed buildings. He is building them with other Gateway tenants’ expansion needs in mind, and perhaps those of new tenants as well.
He plans to market them once he gains local approvals, which could take until the fall.
Casle’s proposal must still undergo review by the Planning & Zoning Commission for a special permit, and by the Conservation Commission, as the parcel contains some wetlands, though Casle’s application says they won’t be disturbed by the project.
Sessions said there are no current plans to sell the property to HTA once it is built out, but said it’s a possibility.
The expansion at Gateway comes as more doctor’s offices and other outpatient medical offices reopen in Connecticut, following the presumed peak of COVID-19 infections in April.
The pandemic has fueled a surge in telehealth activity, as some patients have sought to avoid brick-and-mortar healthcare settings. That’s created uncertainty about the demand for medical developments moving forward, but Sessions has been fairly confident throughout, predicting in May that the state’s aging population and the fact that there will always be a need for in-person healthcare services would provide stability in the medical office market.
On Thursday, Sessions said operations at medical offices appear to be returning to something resembling normal.
“Buildings are continuing to operate, patients are still going,” he said.
Still, he is curious what kind of leasing demand he’ll find once he’s ready to go to market.
“It’s obviously a pretty different world right now,” he said.
