KITCHENER — Trinity United Church has signed with a Realtor to help find a partner to redevelop its downtown site.

Trinity signed Karl Innanen of Colliers International as listing broker on Jan. 15, said Dave Rutherford, a member of the church’s redevelopment steering committee.

Innanen is putting together a package of materials for prospective buyers, and will then be contacting “a fairly targeted audience” of potential developers.

“It’s a very appealing property,” Innanen said of the red brick church at 74 Frederick St., and its lot of just under a hectare.

He says three trends are driving the increase in interest in downtown properties: provincial policies encouraging greater density in cities; the arrival of light rail; and growing demand for places to live in the core. “Lots of people want to live in the urban core, which wasn’t always the case,” he said.

“It’s become a lot more attractive in the last three years, and with all the development we’re seeing of condos and even rentals, this (property) is something that’ll be very attractive to regional, Toronto and national developers.”

There has also been some interest expressed by people in the tech sector who see the possibility of redeveloping the church building as an innovative office site. “I don’t know how practical that is, but we’d certainly take a look at it,” Innanen said.

The church has several goals it wants a buyer to respect, Innanen said. It wants a flexible space within the development to use for worship that could double as community space during the week. The church would also like the plan to include some affordable housing and to be architecturally appealing and transit-oriented, as it will be located right next to the LRT route.

“We have a wish list, for affordable housing, and for a new church to be built by the developer,” Rutherford acknowledged. “We also know that the more we ask, it lessens the number of interested parties.”

Just how the church and the developer would achieve those goals is something that still needs to be worked out, Innanen said. “We don’t know how that’s quite going to look, whether it will be somebody who just buys it and has a contract with the church, or whether we somehow create a partnership.”

It could take several months to find a suitable buyer and complete the sale, Innanen said. “We deal with developers that would do this sort of thing on a very regular basis,” he said. “We go out and approach them, sit down and talk to them about the site, see if there’s any interest there. If there is, we get them as much information as they need to make an offer, and then we sit down with the church and make sure the offer achieves their goals.”

Trinity interviewed three real estate firms, and chose Colliers partly because of its experience dealing with nonprofits, Rutherford said.

Taking this next step toward selling the church site “is a good step,” Rutherford said, but is also difficult for the congregation. There is uncertainty about where it will worship for the three or four years before the development is complete, he said.

“We only move about every 125 years, so it’s hard to go back and say, ‘How did we do this last time?'”