Intel completes sale of Colorado Springs manufacturing plant

A Los Angeles company that specializes in redeveloping corporate real estate has bought Intel Corp.’s now-closed Colorado Springs computer chip manufacturing plant and put it on the market for sale or lease, a broker who is marketing the property said Friday.

Industrial Realty Group, which buys distressed corporate real estate and converts the properties for lease to multiple tenants, bought the 1.4 million-square-foot plant at 1575 Garden of the Gods Road for an undisclosed price, said Michael Palmer of Grubb & Ellis/Quantum Commercial Group in the Springs. Intel laid off most of its remaining 110 employees earlier this year and vacated the property in June; production ended at the plant nearly two years ago.

“It is exciting to have this property on the market. A couple of the biggest recruiting tools for the Colorado Springs area in the early 1990s were facilities like this,” Palmer said. “To get a property like this in the hands of a developer that will generate interest and refill the facility will benefit everyone in Colorado Springs.”

Palmer said Industrial Realty Group is in preliminary lease negotiations with two potential tenants. He predicted that the building would eventually house “hundreds, if not thousands” of employees and would be attractive to a variety of industrial and office space users, including for call centers, administrative and support operations, data centers and medical equipment and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The plant’s sale will make it easier to recruit businesses to the Springs by putting it in the hands of an owner willing to sell or lease parts of it rather than all of it, said Mike Kazmierski, president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Regional Economic Development Corp. Several businesses considering an expansion to the Springs, including data center operators and pharmaceutical manufacturers, have toured the building in recent months, he said.

The manufacturing complex includes office space, clean rooms that were used to manufacture semiconductors, a cafeteria and an exercise room, an electrical substation and state-of-the-art telecommunications service, Palmer said. Intel bought the plant for $45.5 million in 2000 and spent hundreds of millions of dollars expanding it before announcing plans in early 2007 to close the plant after selling the product lines made there.

“This is an amazing facility with a huge amount of infrastructure that will be helpful in acquiring tenants,” said Stuart Lichter, Industrial Realty Group’s president. “Colorado Springs is a great community with great long-term growth prospects. We believe in the community. We bought this property at a great price and we believe it will be a great long-term investment and business for us.”

Lichter speculated it could take “a few years” to fill the complex, which will be renamed later this month, with a mix of tenants that likely would include up to three high-technology firms, up to eight office tenants, several warehouse tenants and other types of businesses.

Industrial Realty Group owns or manages more than 70 million square feet of office and industrial space vacated by corporations or government agencies, including a former landfill at the now-closed Lowry Air Force Base in the Denver area. The company redeveloped a former tire plant in Akron, Ohio, that now houses more than 100 companies employing 3,000 and a former Air Force base near Sacramento, Calif., that now houses 240 companies employing 14,000.

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