The Midlothian Athletic Club Stays: A 450-Unit Proposal That Was Withdrawn

In late January 2025, a Richmond developer went public with a plan to put 450 apartments on the site of the Midlothian Athletic Club, the tennis and fitness club that has operated at 10800 Center View Drive since 1988. Six days later the rezoning case was withdrawn. No news outlet reported the withdrawal, and the club is still open.

This is a small story with a larger one inside it. Midlothian's 1980s office corridor around Koger Center Boulevard and Johnston Willis Drive has more space than tenants, and developers keep testing whether housing is the answer. This particular test ended after a week, which is worth recording precisely because the proposal itself got all the coverage.

Richmond BizSense reported the plan on January 29, 2025. Spy Rock Real Estate Group had the site under contract at an undisclosed price and proposed three buildings: 147 and 130 units on the Koger Center Boulevard side and 173 age-restricted units for residents 55 and older on the Johnston Willis Drive side. The medical office building at Center View Drive and Johnston Willis Drive was excluded from the assemblage. The team included attorneys Andy Condlin and Kim Lacy of Roth Jackson, Timmons Group as engineer and Poole and Poole as architect. The case was expected to reach the Planning Commission in the spring.

What the reporting could not answer was the obvious question. In BizSense's words: "It was unclear whether Midlothian Athletic Club planned to shut down or relocate following its exit from the property." Club representatives did not respond to inquiries.

Very little, publicly. The county's zoning case records show case 24SN1354 with a status of withdrawn and a final date of February 4, 2025. Because the case never reached a hearing, there is no staff report, no recommendation and no vote. The county's geographic information system is the only public record that the case ended at all.

Whether the contract lapsed, the financing did not work, or the parties simply changed direction is not stated anywhere on the record, and this post does not speculate. Spy Rock's Chesterfield footprint remains the 176-unit Lake Forest property; its 2026 projects are in Innsbrook, on Rhoadmiller Street and in South Richmond.

The Midlothian Athletic Club opened in 1988 and has been owned since 2009 by Patrick Galleher of Boxwood Partners and Patrick O'Toole; the property is held by Chesterfield Real Est Ptrs LLC. Galleher described the business to BizSense in 2014, when the club had about 2,700 members and had just put roughly $500,000 into renovations: "We're like a country club without the golf course."

What is there now:

The club's own line is "Since 1988, Midlothian Athletic Club has been a leader in Richmond VA's fitness and health."

The pressure that produced the proposal has not gone away. The Midlothian corridor office submarket holds about 3.34 million square feet with 12.9 percent vacancy and asking rents of $22.64 a square foot, according to Thalhimer's second-quarter 2026 market report. Nearby, five buildings in the Boulders office park, Boulders IV through VIII, totaling 513,000 square feet at about 65 percent occupancy, sold for $35 million on November 3, 2025. And on December 12, 2025, Chesterfield Towne Center sold for $80 million to buyers who said publicly they were weighing redevelopment. The broker who marketed the mall, Mark Williford, put it this way: "long-term, there's likely a higher, better use."

So far the residential growth in this part of the county has gone onto undeveloped office-zoned land rather than into or over existing buildings. Boyd Homes built the 245-unit Gateway Apartment Homes at 801 Gateway Centre Parkway in 2021, and Castle Development's 473-unit Mall Drive Apartments followed in 2022. We have not found a completed office-building-to-residential conversion in the Towne Center and Koger area.

One thing has changed since the case was filed. Under the zoning ordinance rewrite that took effect January 1, 2026, the property is now zoned EC, Employment Center, rather than O-2, and the Comprehensive Plan designates it Regional Mixed Use. Any future proposal starts from that footing rather than from the one Spy Rock was working with. Our post on the Village Overlay explains the rewrite.

The proposal is reported from Richmond BizSense. The withdrawal, the acreage, the zoning history and the current zoning come from Chesterfield County's public zoning case and parcel records, which are the only public record of the case ending; no outlet covered it. The club's amenities and hours come from its own website. Neither Spy Rock nor the club has made a public statement about why the case was withdrawn, and this post does not infer one.

Last updated September 16, 2026.