Submarine House buys former Kettering Family Video for $1.1M

Submarine House chain co-owner Brody Danner said Thursday he hopes to open a new Submarine House in about six to eight months at 930 E. Dorothy Lane, the former location of a Family Video Store.

“We’ve wanted this location for five, six, seven years,” the Kettering native told the Dayton Daily News.

When this restaurant opens, it will mark the company’s 10th company-owned location, and the ninth in the Dayton area. The chain also has a company store in Hilliard, outside Columbus.

“This is will be a bar and grill style,” Danner also said. “That’s all we do any more.”

Over the last 14 or so years, the Danner brothers have worked at making each restaurant in the franchise cohesive in advertising and look, as well as changing the direction of Submarine House to a bar and grill style.

“Since then we’ve gradually changed over all the stores to the bar and grill concept and that’s all we’re doing in the future,” Danner told this news outlet in 2018. “Any store that we had existing that we transferred over to a bar and grill concept we immediately tripled revenue.”

More recently, county property records showed that an Ohio limited liability company bought the property of the former Dorothy Lane video store.

D.I.M. Capital Partners LLC, in Milan, Ohio, bought the store from Family Video Movie Club Inc. for $1.1 million in a transaction that local property records date as July 2.

Family Video bought the property in 2004 for $630,000.

Family Video, the last video store chain in the country, closed all 250 of its locations late last year and early this year.

“While we have faced digital competition from Netflix and others for years, nothing has been as devastating to our business as COVID-19,” the company said in a press release in January 2021.

“The impact of COVID-19, not only in foot traffic but also in the lack of new releases, pushed us to the end of an era,” company president Keith Hoogland wrote in a message on Family Video’s website.

The final closure came after the chain closed dozens of stores the previous fall, including area stores in Huber Heights and Kettering, by early November that year.

Before the final closure, the company still had locations in Fairborn (1896 S. Maple Ave.) and Riverside (5464 Burkhardt Road).

Earlier this year, the Submarine House chain applied for a liquor permit at that location.

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