Milwaukee real estate developer Blair Williams has moved his office from the third floor of the G-Daddy’s BBC bar building on Milwaukee’s East Side to the 12th floor of The City Center at 735 building downtown.
Williams, president of WiRED Properties, has spent the last 40 days having the 2,300-square-foot office space gutted to bring in elements of old and new, including reclaimed wood from Drexel Town Square in Oak Creek, one of several projects he has been working on.
He moved into the new office early this month.
“The old space was a wide open urban loft that overlooked Farwell and North. It was nice because I walked to work, but there were aspects that were no longer working,” Williams said. “We couldn’t get deliveries there and it was not refined enough.”
Williams’s new space overlooks downtown Milwaukee and the Park East corridor where he and developer Sean Phelan are planning to redevelop the National Ace Hardware building, 1303 N. 4th St., into office and retail space.
The office also overlooks the $524 million Milwaukee Bucks Arena development district. Williams has been hired to serve as the Bucks’s managing director of real estate.
Williams is one of three new tenants as of March 1 in the CityCenter office building.
Cincinnati-based Total Quality Logistics leased 9,372 square feet on the sixth floor of the City Center building.
The office is the company’s first in Wisconsin and could bring up to 75 new jobs to the city over the next three years.
A start-up technology firm, Aryetti, LLC, also leased about 1,000-square-feet on the seventh floor.
In April, the City Center lost its largest office tenant when National Business Furniture moved to its parent company’s location in West Allis. The company leased more than 30,000 square feet on four floors in the City Center.
Since August, City Center has filled 15,000 square feet and is back to 86 percent occupied, said Sheldon Oppermann, executive vice president of Compass Properties.
“The marketplace generally thinks we’re full, but with the loss of National Business Furniture, we still have 20,000 continuous feet available right now,” Oppermann said. “That is rare in the city.”
