Developer spends $2.4M on two more Downtown parking lots

JACOB STEIMER | MEMPHIS BUSINESS JOURNAL

Tom Intrator keeps snapping up Pinch District parcels.

The New York-based investor just spent $2.43 million on parking lots at 388 N. Front St. and 367 N. Main St., which contain a combined .8 acres. In July, he closed on a $3.5 million purchase of a 1.1-acre parking lot on Front Street.

With the newest purchases, Intrator has now spent $14.23 million on land in the Pinch this year. He has also purchased four South Main Street buildings for $6.41 million.

Intrator is in the process of converting 18 S. Main St. to office space above retail and — just down the street — he's planning to build a 178-room Dream Hotel in and on top of the Royal Furniture building.

In an April interview, Intrator told the Memphis Business Journal he is currently focused on making South Main a more dense and active corridor.

“If you create the coolest space but, as soon as you walk out of it … everything is dark and vacant, [it won’t work],” Intrator said at the time. “But, if you create a corridor … that starts to draw people into various usages.”

He said he would wait to work in the Pinch area until after his South Main developments get going.

“The Pinch is a more complicated project, whatever way you cut it. There’s not the same movement and momentum there as there is in South Main,” he said. “There are more pieces to that puzzle, which need to come together [first]."

Intrator's firm, Hyde Capital Group, and its subsidiary, Lennox Cos., have owned and managed apartments in the Memphis region for more than six years. He told the Memphis Business Journal in April that he is currently more focused on South Main than on the Pinch.