CVC News > Arizona Republic's Article on Expansion in PV

$25 Mil medical building coming to PV

Grayson Steinberg
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 19, 2007 06:20 PM

Medical office developers finally are giving northeast Phoenix south of Desert Ridge a little love.

Paradise Valley Medical Plaza, a $25 million medical building, will open on the Paradise Valley Hospital campus this fall with about 70 percent of its space already leased. The hospital is just east of Bell Road and Arizona 51. The area largely has been overlooked for years.

The 113,000-square-foot, five-story medical plaza and an adjoining five-story parking structure that both the hospital and plaza would use are under construction, said Peter Spier, vice president of development for Peoria-based The Plaza Companies, the project' s developer.

With little new medical office space built in northeast Phoenix until recently, physicians wanted a new building, Spier said. Other office projects with medical components constructed in the last few years are the recently completed Forty-Fifth Place located just down the street from the plaza.

Few medical buildings had gone up in northeast Phoenix because much of the area's land is taken, said Colleen MacPherson, senior sales associate of office condos and medical projects at CB Richard Ellis.

This could change as the Desert Ridge master-planned community continues to grow, she added.

For now, there's plenty of demand for the medical plaza, said MacPherson, who represented Desert Canyon Pediatrics in a deal to lease space at the new complex. Access to new, high-quality buildings could help neighborhood doctors provide better service, she said.

Dr. Andrei Damian, president of Phoenix's Cardiovascular Consultants, has signed up to lease 22,000 square feet in the building. His current main office doesn't give him room to grow, but the move would change that.

"We are going to be able to have more providers simultaneously," he said. "That will increase productivity."

Other tenants will include a surgery center, cardiovascular specialists and general family practitioners.

The plaza's proximity to the hospital could also aid doctors by ensuring they don't lose time traveling to see their patients.

The hospital is in the midst of a $50 million renovation project. While expansion plans didn't directly inspire the medical plaza's creation, both projects benefit from going on simultaneously, Spier said.

"Our building is basically a bookend that's going to provide a lot of prominence and visibility to the campus," he said.

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