EVERETT — After two years of waiting for the economy to improve, Skotdal Real Estate has started the second phase of construction at its Library Place apartment complex in downtown Everett.
Eventually rising five stories above Hoyt Avenue and seven stories above Rucker Avenue, the secon
d phase will add 179 units to the 22 units already occupied in the first phase building that fronts Rucker Avenue and California Street, said Skotdal Real Estate President Craig Skotdal.
Skotdal said the economic and employment picture improved dramatically in recent months with news that the Boeing Co. will build Air Force refueling tankers based on its Everett-built 767, the Navy will replace the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the USS Nimitz and the pending opening of Providence Medical Center Everett’s new twin medical towers.
“The 2012 employment market in Everett looks good to us,” Skotdal said.
Combine that with a 4.6 percent apartment vacancy rate in the Puget Sound area and Skotdal believes there’s enough market demand to fill phase two of Library Place.
With Library Place and its second phase, Skotdal said the focus is on downtown living “to create that critical mass of people required for that ‘live-work-play’ environment.” Having people live downtown is the most important part of that equation, he said.
Skotdal emphasized that Library Place represents an investment in the future success of downtown Everett by attracting new residents who will spend up to three times as much money in local businesses and attractions than daily workers and visitors typically do.
However, he said, Skotdal Real Estate will have to be patient while that investment pays off since Everett-area rents are typically 30 percent less than comparable rents in Seattle or Bellevue, but construction costs are the same.
“That’s one factor limiting Everett’s growth, but we made the decision to build (Library Place) knowing that, because we’re committed to seeing Everett grow and thrive,” Skotdal said. “It’s our hometown. Each new building adds to the whole.”
Downtown Everett was vibrant through the 1960s, Skotdal said, but after the Everett Mall opened in 1974 and siphoned off customers and businesses, vacant buildings and boarded-up storefronts became the rule.
“It was a ghost town, essentially,” he said.
Skotdal told how his parents, Art and Marianne, lived on his mother’s schoolteacher salary and used his father’s income and their sweat equity to invest in homes and small apartment complexes in north Everett in the mid-1960s. The couple’s first taste of the Everett commercial market came in the early 1980s when Art Skotdal successfully converted the former Chaffee’s department store at 2918 Colby Ave. into office space.
“Their goal was to make each project high quality and long-lasting,” Craig Skotdal said of his parents’ real estate strategy.
It paid off. Over the years, Skotdal Real Estate has incrementally become the predominant commercial landowner in downtown Everett, holding the east block of Colby Avenue between Hewitt Avenue and California Street, the Bank of America building, the Bank of the Northwest tower and the KeyBank tower, among others.
Library Place’s second phase should please people inside and outside the building, thanks to exterior windows measuring 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide. Mix that with 9-foot-tall interior ceilings and the apartments will have a lot of natural light, Skotdal said.
Looking at the footprint of the second phase from his office on the 12th floor of the KeyBank tower on Colby Avenue, Skotdal explained how the apartments facing north to the Everett Public Library will have partial views of the water and Olympic Mountains to the west, thanks to a stepped design. Along Hoyt Avenue, the two corners are set aside for retail spaces between several street-level apartment entrances.
There are already five two-story street-level apartments facing Rucker Avenue, but only one was finished and occupied in Library Place’s first phase of construction, Skotdal said. The other four units were intentionally left empty because the building will rise above them. The fifth unit sits below a space that will be landscaped.
Skotdal knows that street-level apartments are something new for Everett, but they’ve proven popular with city dwellers in Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue and Vancouver, B.C., he said.
In comparison, the new Potala Village apartments on the corner of Rucker and Pacific avenues feature three stories of apartments above street-level retail space.
Skotdal Real Estate is acting as general contractor for Library Place and expects to employ 150 to 200 workers during construction, Skotdal said. The goal to have tenants able to move in by August 2012. The first phase of Library Place included construction of an underground parking garage that will sit beneath the second phase.
When Library Place is completed, Skotdal said his company will have approximately 500 apartment units under its management.
Kurt Batdorf: 425-339-3102, kbatdorf@scbj.com.
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