Like enclosed shopping malls, single-use suburban office parks are facing doubts whether they have a place in the 21st-century economy.

Multifamily housing, medical offices, warehouses and satellite college campuses have begun to fill the void through redevelopments and repositioning of existing buildings. It’s a strategy that’s likely to continue barring a major turnaround in Connecticut’s stagnant suburban office market.

The future of three former corporate campuses is coming into focus as one developer converts part of the former GE Capital headquarters in Stamford into senior housing, another markets the MassMutual property in Enfield and a third looks for a buyer for The Hartford’s former Simsbury campus.

MassMutual’s 66-acre campus is the latest property to hit the market, as the insurer prepares to relocate the local workforce to its Springfield headquarters in 2021. MassMutual hired CBRE’s Hartford office this month to find a buyer for the property, which includes three interconnected office buildings totaling 430,000 square feet.

The marketing campaign focuses on finding a single tenant for the property, said Pat Mulready, a partner at CBRE. The property includes a daycare center and 1,460-space parking garage. With three distinct wings, it also has potential to be broken up to serve multiple tenants, Mulready said.

If the owners eventually consider selling the parcel for other uses, there would likely be demand for medical offices, multifamily housing and distribution space, he said.

“Down the road, if we’re unable to identify an office user, it could be used for a lot of different things. If we were willing to sell to an industrial developer, it would move quickly because there just aren’t many large distribution sites left,” Mulready said.

FedEx Ground in September opened a new, $220 million distribution facility at the 248-acre former Aetna campus in Middletown, which it had acquired in 2016 for $18 million.

Multifamily a Solution to Soft Office Market

Multifamily housing is another emerging redevelopment play.

National Development and Charles River Realty Investors has agreed to buy 10 acres at the former GE Capital offices in Stamford with an eye toward expanding their senior living portfolio. Newton, Massachusetts-based National Development has developed more than 20 senior housing projects in the last two decades, including the Bridges at Trumbull and Bridges at Norwalk.

A stagnant Fairfield County office market and rising demand for senior housing among Baby Boomers played into the investment strategy, said Ted Tye, National Development’s managing partner. The office vacancy rate in Stamford was approximately 30 percent at the end of 2018, according to a recent report from Cushman & Wakefield.

Plans call for National Development to demolish one of the two connected office buildings, while retaining the underground parking garage, Tye said. Groundbreaking will take place in the second half of the year on a 130-unit senior housing complex.

“High Ridge Road just has a great connection to the surrounding communities, and the demographics there are unbelievable,” he said. “The suburban campuses are green, and they were developed by companies that desired to be in a campus-like environment, and that translates well to the type of housing we’re doing.”

Education Another Possibility

Sacred Heart University bought General Electric’s 66-acre former headquarters in Fairfield last year for $31.5 million and is renovating the former office buildings for a new innovation campus.

And in Simsbury, Hartford Financial Services Group’s former campus is back on the market, setting up the second change of ownership since the company moved employees to Hartford and Windsor. The Silverman Group, a New Jersey developer, acquired the property in 2015 for $8.5 million after the town rezoned the property for mixed uses, and demolished the 638,174-square-foot office complex was demolished.

Cushman & Wakefield is marketing the 132-acre campus at 200 Hopmeadow St. and will consider offers for all or portions of the property. The site has approvals for 700 housing units and 71,000 square feet of commercial space.

In a statement, Cushman & Wakefield said the campus is a “unique, high-end and flexible property” with robust existing utilities, offering cost savings to the eventual buyer.