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 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 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 have toured the building in recent months, he 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.
