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Center ice at the FSI Shark Tank

John Komlos knows that today’s commercial real estate market requires more than just a dash of creativity. It requires buckets full of it.

And that’s why St. Louis-based ARCO Construction Company recently finished turning a building designed for office/warehouse space into a hockey rink.

“You have to think outside the box today,” said Komlos, vice president with ARCO. “You never know what you’re going to have to do today to get through this economy. The old way of thinking – we did it this way for the last 50 years, so that’s how we have to do it today – is out the door. Now you have to be entrepreneurial, innovative and creative. You have to solve problems. You have to figure things out.”

That’s exactly what ARCO did when it decided to convert 30,632 square feet of a 61,500-square-foot multi-tenant office/warehouse space in St. Louis into a rink for one of the area’s largest youth ice hockey clubs.

The move is indicative of the challenging times in the commercial real estate industry. Komlos said that ARCO would not have taken on such a project in better economic days. Instead, the office/warehouse, owned by Meramec Bottom Development, LLC, would have been leased long before the Meramec Sharks Hockey Club approached ARCO.

“We would not have done this in better days,” Komlos said.

John Komlos

ARCO built the office/warehouse space in 2006. It was the second of a two-building complex, and he company had, as Komlos said, hit a homerun with the first building. It took hardly any time for that building to earn 100-percent-leased status.

Then, of course, the economy soured. It was time to think creatively.

“The hockey club came to us. Our initial reaction was ‘No way.’ But they kept coming back. We kept financial-modeling it. We eventually made it workable,” Komlos said. “We couldn’t be happier.”

Turning the building into a hockey rink was far from a simple task. ARCO had to relocate a series of columns to make room for a hockey rink that stood 93 feet wide and 210 feet long. This was the amount of space the hockey clubs needed not only for the ice but for the rink’s penalty boxes and benches.

ARCO subcontracted the actual work of installing the ice floor to Little Canada, Minn.-based Rink-Tec, a company that specializes in hockey rink construction.

Construction on the conversion started in February of 2010, with construction crews spending much of the first four weeks of the job moving the columns. It then took Rink-Tec about six weeks to build the ice surface. Construction, then, lasted about three-and-a-half months.

There is still work to be done at the office/warehouse. In addition to the 30,000-plus feet leased by the Sharks hockey club, a commercial flooring contractor has leased two bays in the facility totaling about 12,000 square feet. That leaves 18,750 square feet of remaining space that is out for lease.

Still, Komlos is happy with the way the office/warehouse building is now filling up. If it took some creativity to get to this point, so be it.

“This is definitely a for-profit venture. We didn’t do this for free,” Komlos said. “But it does feel good to know that you’ve made the lives of these kids and their parents a little better. They were playing in an antiquated space. The kids have big smiles on their faces now when they come into this brand-new facility designed just for them.”

Tags | industrial, Missouri, Office, St. Louis

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