Photo provided A slide showing development area on Columbus’ west side.
Columbus Regional Health has reached a preliminary agreement to sell the former site of the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center on the city’s west side to a developer nearly seven years after the hospital system acquired the property during a foreclosure sale.
CRH recently entered into an offer-to-purchase agreement to sell the former Clarion site, located at 2480 W. Jonathon Moore Pike near Interstate 65, to developer Midland Atlantic Properties, said CRH spokeswoman Kelsey DeClue.
Midland Atlantic Properties, which has offices in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, approached the hospital system earlier this year and expressed interest in the property, officials said. However, the sale is not a done deal at this point, and it could potentially be several weeks or more before a final agreement, if any, is reached, as “the buyer’s offer is pending completion of their due diligence,” CRH said.
“We have entered into an offer-to-purchase agreement. Now, we don’t have a signed agreement yet,” DeClue said. “…We’ve entered into the offer-to-purchase process with this developer, and as part of that, they are conducting right now their due diligence.”
The due diligence includes, among other things, researching the property and marketing it to gauge interest from potential tenants or other interested parties, officials said. Midland Atlantic has listed the property online as available for lease or build to suit as part of its due diligence.
Midland Atlantic did not respond to requests for comment on its vision for the property, though the company has marketed the site online as a “mixed-use development” that is “zoned for retail, restaurant, hotel, entertainment and office uses.”
A conceptual plan included in the developer’s marketing materials shows four potential lots on the property, including two lots covering roughly a combined 9.74 acres that are listed as potentially “mixed use hotel,” one 2.38-acre lot listed as “retail/restaurant” and one 4.49-acre lot listed as retail.
City-County Planning Director Jeff Bergman said that no site plans for the site have been submitted to his office.
The potential sale of the former Clarion site to a developer marks the latest turn of events after the hospital system bought the 20.7-acre property in 2017 for $4.25 million and then demolished the structure.
The Clarion, which had 253 guest rooms and a conference center with a 1,000-person capacity, was sold to CRH during a foreclosure sale after the hotel’s owners defaulted on their debt.
For a while after the demolition, the property contained a pile of rubble with debris from the former building and rubble from the Indiana Department of Transportation’s I-65 Expansion Project.
Contractors then broke down and redistributed the rubble on the site and removed trees in a swampy, flood-prone area of the property as part of efforts to raise the lot above the floodplain.
In 2021, CRH reached an agreement with Clearpath Services of Bloomington, in partnership with architecture, engineering and geospatial firm Woolpert in Indianapolis, to turn the former hotel site into a mixed-used development, The Republic reported at the time.
The plan at that time was to sell the site while still retaining a parcel of land within the mixed-used development for hospital programs and services.
An application filed in January 2022 with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management described the site as a “regional gateway” to the city and showed plans for, among other things, a medical facility, some 220 apartments, a 100-room hotel, a grocery store and an “interpretive welcome center, an architectural monument that evokes the proud tradition of Columbus’ iconic, historic church spires.”
But by March 2022, all of that had been put on hold except for the medical facility after the developer was “unable to finalize its plans” and dropped out. At the time, CRH said it was planning to move ahead with plans to build a medical facility on the site.
The hospital system also said at the time that it was still “open” to forming new partnerships to develop the property.
Currently, it is unclear the extent to which any of the hospital system’s previous plans remain in place.
“It’s exciting to see the interest in the property,” DeClue said. “…It’s good, after all the delays that we had with that land, to see this next step kind of starting to take shape.”
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