By Roland Murphy for AZBEX
The Surprise Planning and Zoning Commission will hear a request this week for a site plan to allow the development of a 274KSF warehouse and office project at the SEC of 137th Avenue and Soledad Street.
The Surprise Pointe Industrial proposal calls for a 260KSF warehouse space and 13.7KSF accompanying office area in a single building on 16.23 acres in the Surprise Pointe Planned Area Development. P&Z approved a master site plan for Surprise Pointe in 2006.
Under the existing PAD, building height maximums are set at 35 feet. The application requests an extension to 49.5 feet for “high pile storage… consistent with industry standards.” City staff requested and received acknowledgment from the Fire Marshal that the revised height was acceptable.
No objections to the site plan request were received from the standard reviewing agencies, Luke Air Force Base or the Maricopa Water District. City staff has recommended approval with standard stipulations.
According to the site plan, ATLAS is the project developer, with design and project representation services from Cawley Architects. The civil engineer is JMC Engineering. TJ McQueen & Associates, Inc. is the landscape architect, and electrical engineering is through Hawkins Design Group.
Surprise Development
With the exceptions of the various Prasada announcements, the virulent opposition and controversies surrounding Dominium Management’s Waddell Crossing affordable housing proposal, and the BNSF Railway Western Hub master plan, Surprise has not garnered the expansive media coverage some up-and-coming West Valley cities – particularly Buckeye – have received.
That should, by no means, lead one to think Surprise is languishing. For a small – by West Valley standards – community of only 110.5 square miles, the city has shown a nicely varied and robust development pipeline.
To assess just how development is going in Surprise, we downloaded all the private projects in the DATABEX project database. After culling the master plans and canceled projects, we see both an impressive diversity of projects and a well-balanced state of the pipeline. Under those criteria, a total of 81 projects have been put in play since 2016. Those are nicely balanced across 33 completions, 29 under construction and 27 in various stages of planning/design/review/pre-construction.
Taken all together – and acknowledging a small number of projects do not yet have valuation or square footage data available – the development overview shows estimated construction costs of $2.963B and volumes of slightly more than 15MSF.
As with most West Valley cities, Industrial and Multifamily have been the primary development sectors. Surprise was an early test market for the now omnipresent Build-to-Rent subsector, and there is a near parity between BTR and traditional apartment/condo development. The city has a total of 16 BTRs listed in DATABEX ($615.5M, 3.49MSF) and 23 apartment/condo projects ($777.6M, 4.15MSF). All types of multifamily combined equal 47% of Surprise’s total estimated pipeline construction cost and 50.8% of its total square footage.
On the Industrial side, the 17 projects shown in DATABEX come out to 17.12% of the total estimated construction costs and 24.95% of the square footage. Of those 17, seven projects ($104M, 865.3KSF) have been delivered; five ($69.5M, 597.76KSF) are under construction and the remaining five are making their way through the planning/design/review/pre-construction processes ($357.58M, 2.29MSF).
