Why One Hooksett Office Building Took Five Years to Become Housing, and What It Means for Buyers

What does it take to turn one empty office building into apartments in a town of 15,000 people? In Hooksett, the answer took five years, four rounds of local hearings, a reversal from the state's Housing Appeals Board, and a developer who scaled back his own plans twice before anyone signed off.

The building is at 2 College Park Drive, just off Route 3. It used to hold roughly 250 Cigna employees. Cigna moved out in 2019, work-from-home hollowed out demand for suburban office space, and by 2021 a Brady Sullivan Properties entity called Chelmsford Hooksett Properties had bought the 97,200-square-foot building and the 35 acres under it for $2.5 million, well under its $8.1 million appraised value. Their plan was simple: convert the office building into 81 market-rate apartments. The zoning was not.

Four Hearings and a State Appeal Over One Parcel

The site sits in a district zoned for commercial, retail, and office use. Residential wasn't allowed, so Brady Sullivan needed a variance. The Hooksett Zoning Board of Adjustment said no. Twice. The company appealed to the New Hampshire Housing Appeals Board, which in November 2022 sided with the developer and called the town's denial unreasonable and unlawful. The town asked for reconsideration, and by May 2023 the board reversed course and sided with the town's original denial instead. Brady Sullivan then asked the board to reconsider that reversal, arguing in a filing that summer that the building had sat vacant for more than two years despite what it called aggressive marketing efforts.

Rather than keep fighting over 81 apartments, Brady Sullivan came back in 2024 with something much bigger: a vision for 400-plus housing units across the 35-acre Cigna parcel and an adjacent 63-acre lot, including a multi-tenant commercial building, a brewpub, and an outdoor ice rink for winter months. The master plan came from Prellwitz Chilinski Associates, the same firm behind Tuscan Village in Salem, though this project was designed at a fraction of that scale.

Even that didn't stick. By February 2025, the plan had shrunk again to 160 units on the southern parcel, a mix of apartments and townhouses, plus a smaller commercial building and a pad site for future retail. The project's attorney, John Cronin, described it plainly as a product of going back to the drawing board. The filing noted the property owners had spent more than $200,000 a year in carrying costs with no commercial tenant in sight.

The version that finally cleared the Planning Board, in approvals reported in July 2026, looks like this:

• Phase 1: the original office building converted into 80 apartments
• Phase 2: a new multi-tenant retail building of nearly 8,000 square feet
• Phase 3: an additional 80 apartments and a roughly 3,000-square-foot restaurant
• The existing building repainted to match the new construction, so the whole site reads as one project rather than an old office park with apartments bolted on

One hundred sixty units, five years, and a state appeal to get there. The project shows how a proposal near an existing commercial corridor can move through local hearings and a state appeal before adding housing to Hooksett's stock.

Why Hooksett Doesn't Have a Downtown to Begin With

Here is the part that explains why that fight was so drawn out. Hooksett has never had a conventional downtown, and the reason predates any zoning board. In 1936, floodwaters roughly 18 feet high tore through what was then the town's center, destroying homes, schools, stores, roads, and the Amoskeag Mills complex along the river. The town never rebuilt a village core to replace it. What grew back instead was a town organized around its highway corridors, Interstate 93 and Routes 3 and 101, rather than around a walkable main street.

That absence is not incidental to the town's identity. It is the town's identity, at least until recently. Hooksett's own master plan has called for reestablishing something like a downtown by building out the area known as the village near the Merrimack River, and the town has leaned on state law RSA 79-E, which grants a tax credit on the increased value of rehabilitated older buildings, to try to encourage exactly that kind of investment.

The Council Is Now Talking About This Out Loud

As the Union Leader reported, last month the Town Council held a workshop specifically about this problem. One councilor put it in blunt terms: Hooksett doesn't have a walkable area that feels safe or pedestrian-friendly enough to let people move from one part of town to another the way you would in a village-style downtown. Another councilor pointed out that Hooksett is currently a weak link in the Granite State Rail Trail, a planned 120-mile route for cyclists and walkers running from Salem to Lebanon, with no trail connection at all between Manchester and Concord.

A third councilor argued the town is underusing its land generally, not just the riverfront, and pushed to get more value out of the tax increment financing district the town created back in 2017 along Route 3A and West River Road. A TIF district works by directing a slice of the new property tax revenue generated by development back into infrastructure in that same zone, in theory funding the sidewalks, water lines, and roadwork that make a walkable center possible in the first place. Nine years after it was created, councilors are still debating how to actually use it.

Meanwhile the town keeps growing regardless of whether that infrastructure question gets answered. Hooksett's population rose 3.2 percent between 2020 and 2024, adding about 470 residents for a total near 15,400, according to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. People are arriving faster than the town is deciding what kind of place it wants to become.

What This Actually Means for a Home Price in Hooksett Right Now

This is where the Cigna building fight and the downtown debate stop being interesting trivia and start mattering to anyone comparing Hooksett against Bow, Concord, or Manchester on a spreadsheet.

As of July 2026, the median home price in Hooksett sat around $525,000, with homes typically spending about 22 days on the market before going under contract, well under the national average of 57 days. A separate July 2026 read put the median list price closer to $519,000, with days on market down to about 14, a notable drop from the prior year. Sources differ slightly on direction, with one showing the median sale price up modestly over the trailing 12 months and another showing it down slightly year over year, but they agree on the range and they agree Hooksett homes are moving fast by any regional standard.

Fast turnover without a downtown to anchor it is not a contradiction. It is the whole story. Buyers are not paying a walkability premium in Hooksett the way they might in a town with an established main street, because that amenity largely does not exist yet. What they are buying instead is direct highway access from I-93, Route 3, and Route 101, a Manchester-Boston Regional Airport under 14 miles away, a roughly 15-minute drive to Concord, and, for now, a price point that still runs below what comparable square footage buys in towns with a genuine village center.

That gap will not necessarily hold. The Cigna site's planned 160 units, retail building, and restaurant are part of a mixed-use infill project that has cleared the Planning Board after five years of proposals and appeals. If the TIF district money eventually funds the sidewalks and trail connections councilors were discussing last month, the version of Hooksett that shows up in listings five years from now could look meaningfully different from the one selling in 22 days today.

The Bet Buyers Are Making Today

Choosing Hooksett right now is a bet on convenience over ambience, at least in the near term. Recreational anchors already exist, Donati Memorial Field for sports and community events, Bear Brook State Park for hiking and off-roading, and river access along the Merrimack, but they sit apart from any commercial strip you could walk to on a Tuesday evening. That is likely to change gradually rather than all at once, and the pace of that change is now tied directly to whether projects like the Cigna redevelopment keep clearing the same kind of hurdles that took this one five years to clear.

For a buyer weighing Hooksett against a neighboring town with an established downtown, the honest comparison is not which town is better today. It is which trajectory you want exposure to. Hooksett is mid-transition, with a council discussing ways to expand walkability, a TIF district whose use is under discussion, and one large mixed-use project now under construction after years of appeals.

How does the Cigna building project affect nearby home values? It's the largest new mixed-use project the town has approved in years, planned to add rental housing, retail, and a restaurant to a corridor that previously had none of the three. Its completion is the kind of concrete indicator worth tracking if you're weighing whether Hooksett's commercial amenity base is about to expand.

Is Hooksett a good fit for buyers who want a walkable town center? Not yet in the way an established New England main street offers it. The town's own council has been debating how to build that kind of walkability, and the Granite State Rail Trail gap between Manchester and Concord runs directly through town.

If you're weighing Hooksett against Bow, Concord, or another Merrimack Valley town and want to talk through what a project like this actually means for resale value and timing, Darcy Mantel can walk you through the comparison town by town. Let's Connect.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.