Preston Partners Spends $13.5M for Drugmaker's Plant
July 20, 2007
Baltimore -- July 20, 2007 -- Icelandic pharmaceutical company Actavis has sold its 22-acre plant in Baltimore County to Preston Partners Inc., a Lutherville-based real estate firm that might redevelop the site into a larger office or industrial property, Preston President David P. Scheffenacker Jr. said.
The deal closed for $13.5 million on June 27, according to state assessment and taxation data. As part of the sale, Actavis will lease its space at 7205 Windsor Blvd, from Preston for the next 18 months.
Actavis said last year it planned to close the 240-employee plant within two years as part of a plan to shift its operations to North Carolina. In November, the company said it also planned to out-source the distribution side of its business to a United Parcel Service Inc. center in Louisville, Ky.
Scheffenacker said Preston is considering whether it will keep the 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodlawn intact, renovate it, sell it, or demolish it for a larger redevelopment of the property. Aside from the building, he said, there are about 11 acres left on thee site for new construction.
The plant is large enough for about 300,000 square feet of office space or several hundred thousand square feet of flex space, Scheffenacker said.
Baltimore County Economic Development Director David S. Iannucci said he would like to see more buildings developed on the site if it results in more jobs. He said he is open to a variety of uses including office, software development, and industrial.
Preston was not the only development company interested in the property. Gerard J. Wit, spokesman for Baltimore-based St. John Properties, said he looked at the site and considered bidding for it as industrial land. Wit said St. John, which has developed several single-story buildings in Baltimore County, could not justify the cost of renovating the space when compared to the asking rent for industrial property.
The average rental rate for industrial space in the Baltimore-Washington corridor was $11.15 per square foot for the second quarter, according to MacKKenzie Commercial Real Estate Services LLC. For warehouse space the average asking rent was $5.61 a square foot.
"We liked the property, but it’s a renovation of a building and we don’t really do all that much of those," Wit said.
MacKenzie brokers Michael V. Spedden, Kevin McDonald and Daniel A. Hudak represented Actavis in the deal.