Davis Tool Buys Epson Property for New HQ

HILLSBORO, OR-Davis Tool has acquired a 16-acre property here from Epson that includes a 210,000-sf two-level industrial building built in 1996 and 733 parking spaces, including a five-acre parking lot across the street. The purchase price was $6.2 million. Davis Tool does custom assembly and manufacturing for the aerospace, medical and local high-tech companies. Company president Ron Davis tells GlobeSt.com that the building will be used to consolidate the company’s operations into a single location. The parking lot will be held for future expansion needs, he says.The Epson facility is located at 3740 NW Alocleck Pl., which is accessed off Evergreen Parkway near Cornelius Pass Rd. It has 105,000 sf of 24-foot-clear distribution space on the first floor and another 105,000 sf on a 12-foot-clear second floor that includes a warehouse, office space and an institutional kitchen. The total development cost was $12 million, and the original offering price for the property was $9 million.Davis Tool’s existing operations are in two separate buildings, one elsewhere in Hillsboro that includes the company’s headquarters and another in Forest Grove. Both of those are now being marketed for sale by US Commercial Real Estate broker Ted Anderson, who also represented Davis in the acquisition.”We have been looking at consolidating for a number of years now but (most recently) were waiting for business to start growing again before making the move,” says Davis. “For us, it’s about bringing the team together.Grubb & Ellis managing director Brad Fletcher represented Epson in the sale. Fletcher says the property came to market about three years ago after Epson sent its printer manufacturing offshore. It was reintroduced to the market in January. “I think Epson feels it received full value given an economic climate that has attractive properties trading at significantly discounted prices,” says Fletcher.Indeed, with vacancy in the Sunset Corridor’s class A flex market pushing 30%, there have been several transactions this year that back up that statement. In July, local investor Mike Kalberer acquired from Solectron USA Inc. a flat six-acre parcel off Highway 26 in the Sunset Corridor for $2.80 per sf. The already once-discounted asking price for the ready-to-build site was $4.25 per sf.In May, Intel added to its Ronler Acres campus here by acquiring a 46-acre parcel on Shute Road that holds 383,000 sf of buildings, including two industrial buildings and a 26,000-sf office building. The Santa Clara, CA-based computing products giant paid $13 million for the land and improvements, which last year had an assessed market value of $46.5 million. In January, up in Everett, WA, Solectron sold a six-year-old manufacturing plant here to Seattle-based Washington Real Estate Holdings for $6.4 million in cash. The 33-acre property has 15 useable acres that includes a 179,000-sf industrial building with 15,000 sf of office space, parking for 660 vehicles and a pre-loaded building pad that can accommodate another 45,000-sf building.