Dan Gilbert buys GM’s Millender Center parking deck near RenCen

Dan Gilbert has added another downtown property to his massive real estate portfolio.

His Detroit-based Bedrock LLC said Wednesday afternoon that it has purchased the Millender Center on Jefferson Avenue across from the Renaissance Center for an undisclosed price.

An affiliate of General Motors Co. was the previous owner. The automaker deferred comment on the sale to Bedrock, which did not immediately respond to emailed questions about the purchase. 

The Millender Center has 729,000 square feet-plus of space with 1,738 parking spots and eight retail and dining tenants, according to a press release.

“The acquisition of the Millender Center adds a key downtown Detroit parking asset to the Bedrock portfolio,” Catherine Clark, chief investment officer at Bedrock, said in a statement. “It additionally provides synergies to our Courtyard Detroit Downtown property and the mixed-use amenities located within the area.”

Bedrock bought the 265-room hotel from a GM affiliate in 2019.

The Renaissance City Club Apartments, a 33-story apartment tower that’s part of the development, was not identified as part of the deal. 

The Millender Center, which opened in the mid 1980s and is named after the Robert Millender Sr., sits across Jefferson Avenue from the Renaissance Center, the future of which is up in the air as Bedrock, GM, the city, county and state engage in discussions on how best to repurpose the 1970s office and hotel complex designed by John Portman.

GM owns five of the seven RenCen towers — a 73-story hotel flanked by four 39-story buildings — and is vacating the complex next year for a new global headquarters in the Hudson’s Detroit development that Gilbert is building on Woodward Avenue just north of Campus Martius Park. 

Bedrock says it has a real estate portfolio totaling more than 140 properties — office, retail, residential, industrial, hotel and parking — totaling more than 21 million square feet. 

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