Aus-Tex Printing, which has been in two downtown locations for more than 45 years, has bought the former Celis Brewing Co. brewery and warehouse at 2431 Forbes Dr. in the northeast submarket. The seller was Miller Brewing Co. Terms were not disclosed, but the assessed value of the property is $2.5 million, according to the Travis Central Appraisal District. Carpenter and Associates of Austin represented Aus-Tex.
John Eastty, who owns the company with his wife Marie, tells GlobeSt.com that the downtown is no longer a good place to operate a manufacturing firm. "It's too congested and too expensive to have a manufacturing facility downtown," he says.
Specifically, Eastty cites parking as being too hard to find and too expensive, employees who don't like coming downtown and increasingly congested traffic. "And probably the most major is that taxes just keep going tremendously high," he says. "So it's time to move down the road."
The current Aus-Tex facilities are at 118 W. Third St. on the edge of the warehouse district. As bars and restaurants have opened in that area west of Congress Avenue, industrial operations such as Eastty's have moved out. And it's not just the bars and restaurants that's driving the move: The city hall-Computer Sciences Corp. complex is rising just east of Aus-Tex's facility.
This isn't Aus-Tex's first move. Until 11 years ago, Aus-Tex was east of Congress Avenue, but was forced to move when the Austin Convention Center was built. It had been at that site since 1946.
The former brewery gives Aus-Tex room to expand and it will do so, Eastty says. The 25,849-sf facility is positioned on 8.7 acres. Aus-Tex will add another 25,000 sf. "We're moving two plants together," he says. "We're moving the production print plant and the mail fulfillment division into one building."
Miller, based in Milwaukee, has had the property on the market since late 2000 when it shut down the Celis brewery. Celis made Belgian-style beers that had gained popularity, Miller had acquired Celis to round out its stable of draft beers. Miller closed the operation when it said the beer failed to achieve acceptable market share.
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