Real estate developer Amerimar Enterprises has partnered with investment firm Abrams Capital Management and long-time telco industry entrepreneur Hunter Newby in buying a major carrier hotel in Philadelphia.

The partners will own and manage the 11-story building at 401 North Broad St., often referred to as Terminal Commerce Building, which hosts infrastructure of about 80 networks. The 1.3m sq ft hub provides data center infrastructure for carriers, service providers and enterprises to interconnect with each other and has direct links to fiber routes to Europe.

Amerimar CEO Jerry Marshall said the 80-year-old building had been repositioned to become a key carrier hotel in the region by its previous owner, The Stillman Group. “Amerimar looks forward to continuing with the repositioning of the property through our US$70m capital improvement program,” he said in a statement.

While the deal is an entry into the carrier hotel business for Abrams, this is not the first telco building Amerimar and Newby have bought together. The partners purchased the network hub at 1102 Grand Blvd. in Kansas City and another one at 325 Hudson St. in New York City in 2012.

Newby is a telecommunications and data center industry veteran, having been on the founding team of Telx, a major US data center colocation and interconnection provider.

“401 North Broad Street is an extraordinary carrier hotel,” Newby said in a statement. “Not only is it a major junction point for the north-south domestic fiber routes on the east coast, but it is also home to several transatlantic submarine cable systems, making it a renowned international gateway.”

Abbot Stillman, chairman of The Stillman Group, said he was proud of what the building's previous owner accomplished at the site. “We're very proud of what we've accomplished at 401 North Broad over the years, turning a somewhat bedraggled and relatively empty, but historically significant, building into this extraordinary asset.”