Snake River Landing breaks ground on new office building

Ball Ventures founder Allen Ball (left) and Cortney Liddiard, the company's CEO, chat with executives from Okland Construction  Wednesday at the groundbreaking for The Knolls, a new office building scheduled to open in fall 2020.

Snake River Landing continued its southward expansion Wednesday by breaking ground on The Knolls, a contemporary-styled office building at the corner of Snake River Parkway and Event Center Drive.

The three-story, 60,000-square-foot, building will house the corporate headquarters of Ball Ventures, the Idaho Falls-based developer that began Snake River Landing in 2006. The company’s chief development officer, Eric Isom, said other tenants will be announced in the next three months. The building is scheduled to be completed in  fall 2020.

In addition to Snake River Landing, Ball Ventures is a co-developer of Sandcreek Commons, the shopping center in Ammon. Overall, the company has projects in nine or 10 states totaling about 3.3 million square feet, Isom said.

Like the Waterfront, a smaller event center that opened in 2017, the Knolls represents a departure from the “old Main Street” style of the original Snake River Landing buildings, Isom said. It comes at the end of a summer that saw a large expansion of the nearby Falls apartment complex. A site plan for the nearby Idaho Falls Events Center has been filed with the city’s building department (link here).

Isom said the 450-acre master-planned development is about where they projected it to be when they first broke ground. “We lost four years during the recession, but I think we’re where we thought we would be because of the growth in the last few years,” he said. The Idaho Falls area has seen a dramatic in-migration of people from other states, creating one of the hotter real estate markets in the United States.

“Housing and rooftops drive everything else,” Isom said. “There’s been a lot of positive press about the quality of life here.”

Businesses involved in the design and construction of the Knolls include Dixon and Associates, Horrocks Engineers, Bradley Engineering, HK Contractors, and Okland Construction. Brent Wilson of Thornton Oliver Keller is the listing agent.