BUSINESS
Heating Up
Walt Brown Jr. placed the winning bid of just over $2 million for the former Fire Station 603 building. (David Minton/Staff Photographer)
Realty firm making old firehouse home
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By Alex Gallagher alt Brown Jr. always wanted a creative place his company could call home. “We’ve been at our current office for over 10 years, and we’ve always wanted a unique and special type of environment,” says Brown, the Diversified Partners chief executive officer and founder. “We looked at churches that we thought would be cool to have an office in, along with places along Scottsdale Road, but we thought they were too standard for us.” Then came the news in 2018 that Scottsdale Fire Department Station 603 would relocate in 2020 from a 51-year-old firehouse on McDonald Drive and Scottsdale Road to a new building at Indian Bend and Hayden roads.
Seeing that, Brown seriously considered moving his business a block up the road to the iconic building. Brown reached out to the city about purchasing it. It planned to auction the site. But Brown was determined to make it his own. He toured the facility and liked its high ceilings, long history and the flagpole outside the main entrance. “We knew we wanted to make the move after we evaluated it,” Brown says. In January 2022, the building was appraised at just over $1.13 million. The city’s minimum bid was just over $1.16 million. Brown and his team entered the auction determined to spend as much as needed to procure the space. “We got our ducks in a row and went to the auction with the mentality that
22 / SCOTTSDALE AIRPARK NEWS / JULY 2022
we weren’t leaving until we bought the property,” Brown says. “There were some great real estate minds at that auction, even some friends of mine, but I had to buy it.” Brown placed the winning bid of just over $2 million. Although elated, Brown knew it would be a tall order to convert a fire station into an elaborate office space. “The fire station has a ton of electrical in it that you wouldn’t need in an office building,” says Brown, who added the building needed updates, too. “Whenever you’re dealing with an old building that’s been remodeled three times, it’s sometimes tough to work through in terms of redefining the space. There are different ceiling heights, there’s old HVAC, and the garage has HVAC that consists of
