In the industrial category, Paul Breuer and Jeff Brooks won for their involvement in the $185-million sale of the Fujitsu chip fabrication plant in Gresham, Ore. to Microchip Technology. In the office category, Colliers' Gordon King, Mike Holzgang and Brad Christiansen won for their work accommodating Liberty Northwest Insurance in Ashforth Pacific's buildings in the Lloyd District.
The Fujitsu property includes 826,000-sf of buildings and 75 acres of land available for future development. In 2000, the 12-year-old plant received $350 million in upgrades to convert all production lines to flash memory, the memory used for cell phones and other handheld electronic devices.
It was Fujitsu's first overseas wafer fabrication facility and one of its key production bases for memory products. After the April 2000 upgrade, the economic downturn forced Fujitsu to run the plant at well below capacity. In August 2001, Fujitsu tried to get AMD to buy a 50% share of the Gresham plant, but the deal fell through. Fujitsu announced the plant's year-end closure and its ultimate sale in November 2001.
Breuer and Brooks, working with Stephen Rothrock out of Colliers' Seattle office, flew to Tokyo to make sure their opinion was heard about how the property should be marketed. While Fujitsu's advisors in the disposition thought the plant should be decommissioned and parted out, the Colliers teams argued that the highest price could be had by selling a ready-to-operate facility to another chip manufacturer.
The trio's effort resulted in the listing being given to them on March 8, 2002, but there wasn't much time. The $5-million-a-month cost to keep the plant ready for another company's use would fast eat away at the higher sales price Colliers promised it could achieve.
Within 30 days of the trip a marketing plan was in place and 300 potential buyers were being contacted. The Colliers marketing team created a horserace by giving interested parties 40 days to tour the facility, another 20 days to submit LOIs and then another 30 days for negotiating a formal purchase and sale agreement.
On the first day of the 40-day tour window, there were three requests for tours. After the Colliers brokers circumvented a few more roadblocks regarding how much information about the plant could be given out to prospective buyers, Microchip Technology toured the facility on the 15th day and made an oral offer the same day that was contingent upon Fujitsu taking the property off the market and halting the offering memorandum process.
To help seal the deal, the City of Gresham, Multnomah County and the state put together a package of more than $17 million in tax breaks in record time.
In the office transaction of the year, Colliers brokers shuffled several tenants between Lloyd District buildings controlled by Ashforth Pacific in order to create 40,000 sf of expansion room for Liberty Northwest Insurance in Liberty Center, a 280,000-sf building that was 100% leased.
The expansion room was necessary because Liberty Northwest had acquired North Pacific, which had an office in Beaverton that Liberty wanted to consolidate into the Lloyd District. Holzgang, luckily, had placed two of Liberty Center' tenants, including Paccess, an independent packaging supplier, which turned out to be interested in downsizing from its current lease of 22,700 sf.
Ultimately, Paccess was relocated from the middle of Liberty Center to the top of Lloyd 700, an older 16-story office building Ashforth owns in the district. To create the rest of the needed space, Ameriquest was also relocated to Lloyd 700 and Principal Financial relocated outside the Ashforth portfolio.
The moves not only gave Liberty Northwest the space it wanted, it saved the company $600,000. As well, it saved Paccess an estimated $1 million in lease payments and dramatically improved its view.
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