Home Depot Buys 12.5-Acre Ward's Site

BEAVERTON, OR-The last available Montgomery Ward site was snatched up recently by Home Depot, which is planning a new 136,000-sf location. The Atlanta-based warehouse home improvement retailer acquired 12.5 acres in Beaverton between Canyon Road and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, just east of Oregon 217 and very near a recently defunct HomeBase location.

The company isn’t saying how much it paid for the site and the information was not otherwise immediately available. The company does, however, say that the average cost of developing a new store is $14.9 million per location, including land costs. In addition, each new store requires approximately $3.5 million to finance inventories, net of vendor financing.

The acquisition by Home Depot means it will have another chance to build in Beaverton. In April, plans for a downtown store on property the company has optioned were shot down by the City’s planning commission. The new project includes plans to rebuild a Chuck-E-Cheese restaurant currently operating on the Montgomery Ward property.