Kyocera Selling 38-Plus Acres to City Agency for $20M

VANCOUVER, WA-The Vancouver Housing Authority, which doubles as the city’s public development agency, has tied up 38.5 acres here for redevelopment. The site is a portion of the Kyocera Technology Park at 5713 East Fourth Plain Blvd. The seller is San Diego-based Kyocera International, which is holding onto seven acres for the existing operations of its subsidiary, Kyocera Industrial Ceramics Corp.The 38.5-acre site is zoned for manufacturing and includes an 89,000-sf building formerly occupied by AVX Corp., a Kyocera affiliate, in which ceramic capacitors were produced for use in electronics. The site could accommodate approximately 238,000-335,000 sf of new buildings as zoned, though the plan is to rezone the 12 westerly acres for office and residential. The purchase price is approximately $20 million, and the closing is scheduled for November 2005. The VHA’s chief executive Kurt Creager tells GlobeSt.com that he has 90 days to organize bridge financing, and it is going to take a public-private partnership to make it happen. As part of the public portion, Creamer says he has asked the New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corp. to consider underwriting part of the equity with New Market Tax Credits. For the debt side, Creager says he is talking to multiple lenders, including Bank of America, with which it has an existing relationship. At the same time, he is talking to institutional investors, both industrial REITs and insurance companies. “At the end of the day I expect the purchase to be financed through three different sources,” he says.Group MacKenzie is designing a master plan for the property. Creager says the VHA will obtain the entitlements and then subdivide the property and sell parcels to developers. “We will conclude the master planning process by March of next year and then likely will send out an RFQ,” he tells GlobeSt.com. “Our goal is to own the property for as short a period as possible–to reduce our financial exposure and attract partners–and then affiliate with any number of downstream developers or owner-builders.”