EVANSVILLE - The former Old National Bank tower at 420 Main St. in Evansville is on the real estate market.
Its asking price is $5 million.
The 18-floor office building is about 45-percent occupied, mostly with accounting and law offices. All leases will be honored, said Ken Newcomb, president and co-manager of F.C. Tucker Commercial, lister of the property now owned by Sollers Point Limited Partnership of Baltimore.
Sollers Point has owned the tower since it opened in 1970. It has about 149,000 net square feet and 135,000 usable square feet.
Newcomb said it’s a good time to put the property on the market because of the pending convention hotel and medical campus Downtown.
“There are number of possibilities for the building because of, one, where it’s located,” Newcomb said. “We’re looking at possible retail on the first floor. We’ve talked to a number of developers about converting some floors to residential. There is that possibility also of just keeping it as an office building.”
F.C. Tucker already has one offer on the building and “we’ve had a variety of people look at it,” Newcomb said.
A consultant is working on a new master plan for Downtown, and medical office space is a strong possibility for the former bank tower, said Department of Metropolitan Development Director Kelley Coures.
A streetscape improvement planned as part of the new Downtown development will run along Fifth Street, starting at the new Indiana University School of Medicine Multi-Institutional Academic Health Science Education and Research Center-Evansville and ending on Main Street at the former bank tower.
“If you want to develop Class A office space in an urban area, the first thing you have to consider is parking, and you already have a massive parking structure underneath that building,” said Coures, who remembers riding his bike Downtown in the late 1960s as the tower was being built.
The former bank tower’s top two floors, which used to be the Petroleum Club, are now vacant except for two small office tenants on the 18th floor.
Besides revenue from tenants, Newcomb said antennas on the rooftop also are a revenue source for the building.
Old National Bank moved out of the tower about a decade ago when its new Riverfront headquarters opened. It has a sixth-floor balcony, which used to house the bank’s administrative offices and conference area.
The ground floor still looks like a bank lobby. Mayor Lloyd Winnecke is using the space as his re-election campaign headquarters.