Nichols brothers sell full city block in Scott’s Addition to D.C. developer for $13M

The Hoffman site sits next to The Otis, a large apartment building from Capital Square and Greystar.

A D.C. firm has set a new high bar for per-acre land purchases in Richmond with a hefty deal in Scott’s Addition. 

Hoffman & Associates this week paid $13.3 million for the entire city block at 3200 W. Moore St., where the company is planning a mixed-use building with hundreds of apartments. 

The price for the 2.4-acre plot comes to $5.6 million per acre, the most paid by any developer for land per acre in the city. The previous per-acre record was held by Henrico-based Capital Square, which last year paid $5.2 million per acre for the former Dairy Bar complex in Scott’s Addition.  

Hoffman’s purchase closed Jan. 21. The seller was an entity tied to the Nichols brothers, who formerly owned HandCraft Cleaners. The city most recently assessed the property at $8.3 million.

Hoffman is a major developer throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, with 75 properties in its portfolio valued at over $6 billion. Its holdings include The Wharf, a 3.5 million-square-foot development along the Potomac River in D.C.

A rendering of the planned building. (Courtesy Hoffman & Associates)

The Moore Street deal is Hoffman’s first in Richmond, though the firm did vie for the city’s Diamond District project in 2022. 

The company’s $130 million-plus development at 3200 W. Moore St. has been in the works since 2023, and is slated to include 366 apartments and 17,000 square feet of commercial space. 

The building was initially planned to reach six stories, but Hoffman president Maria Thompson said in an email last week that the firm is now planning to go to seven stories.

Thompson said construction is expected to begin before the end of 2025.

Hanbury is the project architect and VHB is the engineer. Thompson said a general contractor has not yet been selected.

The majority of the block is currently a surface parking lot, save for a pair of industrial buildings, one of which formerly housed Roy’s Electric Motor Sales & Service, a longtime local company that relocated to Mechanicsville in 2022. 

City records show the Nichols had bought the land for a total of $4.6 million. They bought the bulk of the 1.4-acre parking lot in 2011 for $300,000 before buying the Roy’s Electric property for $4 million in 2023.  

As for the aforementioned Dairy Bar complex, Capital Square received city approval last summer for a 320-unit mixed-use development on the site, but construction has yet to begin.

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