A Spokane-based investor group plans to develop an $11.5 million office building on the West Plains and expects to begin work on the project soon, says Lowell McKee, one of the investors.

The planned two-story, 47,000-square-foot structure, to be called the West Spokane Professional Building, will be located at 1415 S. Deer Heights Road, at the southeast corner of Highway 2 and Deer Heights Road, west of Spokane and just east of Airway Heights, McKee says.

Along with McKee, the investor group that will develop the project, called West Spokane Professional Building LLC, includes Spokane developer Dick Vandervert, Pullman developer K. Duane Brelsford, and two other investors McKee declines to name.

The new office building will be constructed in the Deer Creek Village development, which includes Deer Creek Apartments and the Village Centre Cinemas Airway Heights. Those projects also were developed by Vandervert and McKee, and the cinema is operated by a company Brelsford heads.

Vandervert Construction Inc., of Spokane, will be the contractor on the project, and Russell C. Page Architects PS, of Spokane, designed it.

McKee says the building's exterior will have prominent flagstone and heavy-timber features and will be similar in appearance to the three-story Wandermere Professional Building, at 309 E. Farwell Road, north of Spokane.

McKee says site work will start within days, and he expects that Spokane County will approve a building permit soon. The project will take about 10 months to complete, he says.

No tenants are lined up to lease space in the planned building yet, McKee says.

"Because of its proximity to downtown Spokane and hospitals, we will try to entice medical businesses into coming to take a look at it," he says. "It's so close to downtown Spokane, it should be attractive to users of the core area."

Even though few commercial projects currently are being built on speculation in the Spokane area, McKee says he thinks there's demand for office space on the West Plains.

"It's a risk you have to take," he says. "There is little construction of this type out there, and I feel it's the area of the future."

Bank of Whitman is providing financing for the project.