New Hire Will Guide 7M-SF Project

GARDNER, KS-William F. Crandall, formerly president of Crandall and Co., has signed on as president of a new Kansas City office of the San Diego-based Allen Group. The company is entrusting Crandall to lead the effort to build the seven-million-sf Kansas City Logistics Hub, next to a 400-acre new Burlington Northern Santa Fe Intermodal Facility here, among other commercial real estate ventures.

Crandall brings with him two other large projects: the construction of Applebee's 180,000-sf new headquarters in Lenexa and finding a new home for Andrews Publishing, needing 80,000-sf of office space in Kansas or Missouri. He has the background for large jobs; when he was with Zimmer Real Estate Services Inc., he was master developer for Village West, an $800-million, two-million-sf retail and entertainment district in Kansas City, KS. He also led the team that completed the management of the $1-billion Sprint World Headquarters campus.

The Gardner logistics hub will be on up to 800 acres, and will serve companies trying to move goods from as far as Asia to the East Coast, Crandall tells GlobeSt.com. Right now, the wheels have just started spinning for the project, he says. "We're in the process of the assembling the land, which will include the annexation of some parcels into Gardner," Crandall says. "There are a lot of activities going on a concurrent scheduled, such as gaining financing."

He says more than $30 million will be spent on site infrastructure, but says he can't say how much the first buildings will cost. "We'll have between 400,000 to 600,000 sf of speculative distribution centers going up," Crandall says. "We hope to be online by 2009."

Crandal says the BNSF officials created a relationship with Allen to build the logistics hub. "They need people to help build distribution centers around their rail lines," he says. "Our goal is to help shorten the time that goods get to market." The park is expected to create more than 20,000 jobs for the area, he says.