545 Michigan Street NE

545 Michigan Street NE is the first ground-up project Third Coast Development ever built. Founded in 2004, the firm spent its first two years on redevelopment and adaptive reuse work before breaking ground here in 2006. The building marked the firm’s transition from rehabbing existing structures to delivering new ones — the reference point for nearly everything Third Coast has built since.

The site sits on Michigan Street NE, the corridor that connects downtown Grand Rapids to the Medical Mile and the East Hills neighborhoods beyond. In 2006 the bet on this location was less obvious than it looks today; in the two decades since, the corridor has densified considerably, and the surrounding blocks now host a mix of medical, office, residential, and retail uses that the building helped seed.

The program is a multi-tenant Class A office building, and Third Coast Development’s own headquarters occupies Suite 101. The decision to build on, and then move into, the firm’s first new-construction project was a deliberate one — a working argument that a regional developer could deliver ground-up commercial product in a corridor that hadn’t seen much new construction, and stand behind it as both builder and tenant.

545 Michigan remains a reference project for the firm: the building that established Third Coast’s appetite for new construction, the location bet that aged into a conviction, and the headquarters from which everything since has been managed.