Hartford HealthCare has paid $17.4 million for the former Sam's Club property at 69 Pavilions Drive in Manchester, a 138,215-square-foot building on 13.07 acres that the health system plans to turn into a centralized medication distribution center. The deal, finalized through a warranty deed recorded on October 7, closes the book on a big-box store that has sat empty and repurposed since 2018.
According to Hartford Business Journal, Hartford HealthCare acquired the property from Clancy Manchester LLC. The health system says the building will serve, in its words, “as a centralized medication distribution center for our hospitals and provide expanded space for our retail and specialty pharmacy operations.”
Hartford HealthCare also said it intends to bring in advanced automation and robotics as part of the pharmacy buildout, technology the health system says will help “enhance accuracy, efficiency, and reliability” across its medication distribution network, per the same report. Consolidating medication inventory and distribution into a single site, the health system said, could improve efficiency, cut down on waste, and strengthen its ability to provide access to medications — including those affected by national shortages.
A Big-Box Building's Long Road to a Pharmacy Hub
The building at 69 Pavilions Drive has changed hands and purposes more than once since it first opened. Built in 1991 near the Shoppes at Buckland Hills mall, the Sam's Club closed in 2018, leaving a sprawling, vacant retail shell in one of Manchester's busiest commercial corridors.
Grossman Cos. bought the property for $6.75 million in 2021 and converted it into warehouse space, which it then leased to Clancy. The 2021 purchase came amid what the Hartford Courant described at the time as a warehousing boom across Manchester and Connecticut, with Amazon cited as a major driver of that growth. Clancy operated in the building under a seven-year lease before exercising an option to purchase the property outright, the station's report on the earlier sale noted.
The dossier's record of that interim Clancy purchase is inconsistent: Hartford Business Journal's own later account references a $11.6 million purchase by Clancy in December 2024, while an earlier Hartford Business Journal headline put the same transaction at $11.75 million. Reported building square footage has also varied slightly across coverage, with figures of 138,215 and 139,145 square feet appearing in different accounts of the same property.
Part of a Broader Manchester Health Care Push
The pharmacy purchase follows Hartford HealthCare's acquisition of Manchester Memorial and Rockville General hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings on January 1, 2026, a deal for which the health system paid $86.1 million. Hartford Business Journal reported that Hartford HealthCare committed to nearly $227 million in capital investments over three years tied to those hospitals.
A separate report from The Hartford Courant in July put the figure differently, stating that investment in the two hospitals would be more than $300 million over the next several years. The two numbers may reflect different scopes or timelines, but the available reporting does not clarify how they relate to each other.
Retail Space Finding New Life as Industrial Use
The Sam's Club conversion fits into a pattern that commercial real estate professionals have been tracking for years. Colliers' Nicholas Morizio has described the broader trend of empty big-box retail getting a second act, noting that such spaces are “being converted to office, storage and industrial” uses across the region, the station's report noted.
For Hartford HealthCare, the Manchester property purchase doubles as a statement of commitment to the town. The health system has said it chose Manchester to demonstrate its long-term investment in the community and to support future regional health care delivery, with plans to use state-of-the-art technology at the facility to prepare for future pharmacy services. No opening date, project cost, or construction timeline for the pharmacy conversion has been disclosed.
