A New Jersey real-estate investment firm has acquired the building at 2649 Erie Boulevard East in Syracuse, which was previously occupied by a Sam’s Club store before it closed in early 2018. The Hampshire Companies, headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, plans to renovate the structure for a self-storage facility. (Eric Reinhardt / BJNN)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A New Jersey real-estate investment firm has acquired the building at 2649 Erie Boulevard East in Syracuse, which was previously occupied by a Sam’s Club store before it closed in early 2018.

The Hampshire Companies — headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey — plans to convert the 135,000-square-foot building into a self-storage facility. It will work with investment partner, Circle Squared Alternative Investments, also of Morristown, on the project.

Construction is set to begin later this summer, Hampshire Companies said in a Thursday news release.

The Hampshire Companies declined to disclose the cost to buy the building from Walmart and Sam’s Club and the cost of its upcoming project, the company tells BJNN in an email message. The firm does plan to make a “substantial financial investment into the property to bring it up to institutional quality,” it adds.

Hampshire’s plans call for an adaptive-reuse project for the building, creating an 860-unit self-storage facility to be managed by Malvern, Pennsylvania–based CubeSmart (NYSE: CUBE). It’ll be the first self-storage facility that CubeSmart will manage on behalf of the Hampshire Companies, per the release.

“The ongoing decline of big-box retailers across the nation has put many retail owners in a difficult spot as they are being left with vacant large retail properties that can be virtually impossible to lease up,” James Hanson II, president & CEO of the Hampshire Companies, said. “This project stands out as an example of our team’s ability to see these types of properties through a different lens. Applying our decades of development and redevelopment experience, we are able to find alternative usages for vacant buildings like this to bring first-class, institutional quality self-storage assets to underserved markets across the Northeast.”

Having developed or repositioned 35 self-storage facilities with an aggregate value of more than $438 million since 2012, Hampshire contends it has “built an impressive portfolio” of self-storage facilities along the eastern U.S. Hampshire continues to grow its self-storage footprint with 11 self-storage development projects currently underway, aggregating $237 million of investment. It is targeting another 11 additional projects with an aggregate value of $190 million in the pipeline.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com