Construction at the 100-acre Grandview Yard development continues with work on a conference center and a second hotel slated to start next month, according to the project’s developer, Nationwide Realty Investors.
And there’s more to come.
“We’ll continue to grow the residential side of things,” said Brian Ellis, president of Nationwide Realty. “And there’s room for quite a bit more commercial development — mostly restaurants and some retail and offices.”
The hotel will be a four-story Courtyard by Marriott with 135 rooms, an indoor pool and fitness center, and a bistro that serves breakfast, light meals and alcoholic beverages.
The 13,000-square-foot Grand Event Center will have full catering capabilities and a ballroom that seats 300 people at tables or 400 people theater-style, plus three additional meeting rooms.
The hotel and conference center will share a large courtyard with a fire pit.
“We see the event center very much as a meeting and a wedding venue, with opportunities to open up the ballroom into the courtyard,” Ellis said.
Construction on both projects is expected to be completed in the summer of 2016.
Grandview Yard also will be home to office workers, and construction has already started on the first phase of the Nationwide Insurance campus there that will eventually accommodate about 3,000 employees.
Construction also has begun on the 20 detached homes and 25 town houses on the western part of the site being built by Wagenbrenner Development.
The success of Grandview Yard’s first hotel, the Hyatt Place Columbus/OSU, led to the second hotel.
“The Hyatt has exceeded our expectations, and we’re very confident there’s a strong demand for a Courtyard by Marriott,” Ellis said.
The revenue stream coming from the hotel is something the city of Grandview Heights is anticipating. The city has a 10 percent bed tax, with Grandview Heights receiving 60 percent while the county receives the remainder.
The Grandview Heights portion was about $250,000 in 2014, said Megan Miller, the city’s assistant finance director.
These funds helped pay for improvements to two city parks, said Grandview Heights City Administrator Patrik Bowman. “The additional bed taxes (from the Courtyard by Marriott) will allow us to fund even more public improvements,” he said.
The location of Grandview Yard and growing list of amenities brought guests to the hotel and should bring a lot of meeting attendees, said Eric Belfrage, a hotel specialist with the commercial real-estate firm CB Richard Ellis in Columbus.
“It’s a great location, in terms of its proximity to the urban core as well as to Ohio State and the medical centers and Battelle and Chemical Abstracts,” he said. “It’s a deep market.”
Capitol Square Ltd., the real-estate arm of The Dispatch Printing Company, publisher of The Dispatch, has a 20 percent stake in Grandview Yard.
