Do you want to be a real estate developer? Have you got an appetite for vacant land on Grays Ferry Avenue? Do you dream about owning a property that’s immediately next door to a meat wholesaler? Buddy, have we got the property for you. Consider, if you will, 2701 Ellsworth St., which seemingly checks all of these boxes. This property is triangular in shape and covers 787 sqft, and has been used for billboards for a number of years.

The billboards, you can see, are now gone, and the lot is sitting vacant. It’s zoned for industrial use, but the current owners took it to the ZBA last year and got approvals to build a duplex at the site. Gnome Architects did the design work for the project, and they’ve done a nice job utilizing the curves of the site to spec out a unique looking building that echoes another Gnome project up the street, at Grays Ferry & Carpenter.

For $195K, it can be yours! While we’d say that’s probably a bit too high of an asking price, it’s not altogether crazy, as it would have been as recently as a couple years ago. See, there are a ton of new projects in this immediate vicinity, and there are more on the way. Just across the street, a mixed-use building with retail on the first floor and three units upstairs looks like it’s approaching the finish line in the near future. You may recall, we previously told you about that project a couple years back. Next door to that building are other new buildings or construction sites.

Around the corner on Federal Street, there’s more to come. At 2736 Federal St., we told you last year that developers were hoping to build an 18-unit building in place of an old warehouse. Those plans evolved, and the unit count surprisingly jumped up to twenty-four. The old warehouse has come down and the permits were issued back in April, so figure construction will start soon. Meanwhile, at 2731 Federal St., the same group that’s selling 2701 Ellsworth St. is proceeding with a plan to build a six-unit building. We can certainly appreciate their appetite for building the larger project over the duplex, and only hope that the Federal Street building will look half as cool as its neighbor to the north.

We’ve noted before that Grays Ferry has seen a ton of development in recent years, but it’s tended to be on the smaller side, since most of the properties in the neighborhood are, uh, small. But we’ve also commented that the little pocket along Grays Ferry Avenue contains some of the larger lots in the neighborhood, though with the added challenge of industrial zoning, which means that residential development requires a zoning variance. That being said, all of the projects mentioned above received variances, which could be an indication to developers that this is a potential route in this part of town. We suspect we’ll see more sizable residential projects crop up in this section of Grays Ferry in the coming years, with industrial uses starting to fade as the residential projects continue to pile up.