Opus pays $22M for former Target building.

Byline: Matt M. Johnson

The Opus Group paid $22.1 million for the former Target office building just outside downtown Minneapolis and expects to complete renovations for new tenants next spring.

Minnetonka-based Opus closed Dec. 13 on the 392,335-square-foot building at 3701 Wayzata Blvd. in Minneapolis, according to a certificate of real estate value made public last Friday.

Opus signed a purchase agreement for the property in March, but had been waiting to get a "healthy percentage" of the building leased before closing the deal, said Opus Senior Director Phil Cattanach.

The seller is Minneapolis-based Target Corp. The sale comes two years after the retailer moved about 1,300 employees out of the 65-year-old building to the company's 1.3 million-square-foot North Campus in Brooklyn Park.

The 25.8-acre former Target campus, which is 2 miles from downtown, is next to Brownie Lake and overlooks Interstate 394. Opus has given the building the working name "3701 Wayzata," but plans to give it a permanent name in the future.

The purchase price works out to $56.33 per square foot. The building last sold for $9 million in 1994. Hennepin County values the property at $16.7 million.

Opus has signed leases with tenants that will take up almost half of the building, Cattanach said in an interview. He declined to name the future tenants.

Minneapolis-based Tactile Medical, which makes products for treating chronic medical conditions at home, said it will occupy about 100,000 square feet of space at 3701 Wayzata. The company currently leases 60,000 square feet of office space in the Crown Center at 1313 Tyler St. NE in northeast Minneapolis.

Tactile will occupy the second and third floors of 3701 Wayzata, said Tactile CEO Gerald Mattys. The company moved into the 114-year-old Crown Center 10 years ago and has since expanded several times to fill that building.

The 250 Tactile employees in those offices need more space, Mattys said. The new building meets that need as well as Tactile's desire for modern space with more parking. The 3701 Wayzata building offers about 1,200 surface parking stalls.

"We were looking for an upscale...