Company Buys Land for 110,000-SF HQ

BEAVERTON, OR-Pacific Office Automation will break ground this May for a new 110,000-sf headquarters building on 8.2 acres adjacent to Highway 26 in Cornell Oaks Business Park. The longtime West Coast seller and servicer of copiers and other office machines plans to consolidate most of its area operations (about 200 of its 450 employees) in the new three-story building by the end of the year.POA paid $10 per sf, or about $3.5 million, for the Cornell Oaks property and will spend another $10 million to develop its new headquarters on the site. The new building will house the company’s corporate headquarters, service center and two of three sales offices now spread among multiple Washington County business parks. Tom Talbot of GVA Kidder Mathews represented POA in the transaction. Dan Swift of CB Richard Ellis represented PS Business Parks. “This is exactly the type of structure we envisioned for the site,” says Coby Holley of PS Business Parks, the publicly traded owner of Cornell Oaks. “The three-story brick and glass [building] adjacent to Highway 26 will make a great statement about our park… .” POA sells and services copiers, fax, scanning, storage and other document workflow devices, and provides office automation hardware and software solutions to customers throughout the west. The company’s headquarters is currently housed in a 28,000-sf building at 14335 NW Science Park Dr. The owners of the company, Karen and Terry Newsom, sold the building earlier this year to their next door neighbor, outdoor clothing retailer Columbia Sportswear, for $4.l million and are now leasing it back until the new building is ready for occupancy. Also to be consolidated into the new building are its sales office for Toshiba products, located in 21,000 sf of leased space at the 217 Distribution Center, and its Sharp products sales office, which occupies 18,000 sf of leased space at Cornell Oaks. POA also has a Rico Minolta products sales office across from its existing headquarters that initially will not be consolidated into the new building, which may be expanded by another 30,000 sf as needed.Group Mackenzie is the project architect. Perlo McCormack Pacific is the general conbtractor.