Hartford’s well-documented economic struggles initially discouraged Adam Stark from investing in the capitol city when looking to make his first Connecticut acquisition outside Fairfield County.

The president of Rye Brook, New York-based Stark Office Suites spent 18 months scouting properties in the region and settled on a historic downtown Hartford former bank building – the Hartford Trust Building at 750 Main St. The purchase price was $4.3 million, the Hartford Courant reported.

The opening of University of Connecticut’s downtown Hartford campus, hundreds of new apartments and opening of the Connecticut Yard Goats minor league baseball stadium outweighed the negatives, Stark said.

“It seems to be part of the whole urbanization trend. Hartford’s behind some of the other markets, but I like what’s going on there,” he said.

Stark Office Suites has nine other locations in New York, Westchester County and Fairfield County, offering leases as short as one year and a fast turnaround on fully built-out office suites.

While all of the company’s other locations are leased, the opportunity to acquire the 17-story, 130,000-square-foot Hartford building was too good to pass up, Stark said. He plans to upgrade the building’s “very limited” Internet service both for its approximately 60 existing tenants, which occupy 75 percent of the building, and future arrivals.

Owning the property will allow the 13-year-old company to offer larger office suites than it’s traditionally made available, Stark said.

New tenants will have access to the company’s other properties including its three Connecticut locations at The Greenwich Office Park, 243 Tresser Boulevard in Stamford and 100 Mill Plain Road in Danbury.