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Industrial centers in spotlight

By John R. Pulliam - The Galesburg Register-Mail
June 23, 2007

Tours of Maytag, Butler sites promote possibilities
 
GALESBURG - Many cities offer a spring festival of homes, having open houses for potential buyers. Galesburg had a similar event Friday, but the buildings were a bit larger. Galesburg Days featured an open house for brokers and Realtors at the former Maytag and Butler Mfg. facilities here.
 
The tours of the former Maytag factory, distribution center and the 900,000-square-foot Butler Mfg. complex continue today for the public. Anyone interested in touring the buildings that Tower Investments and Industrial Realty Group hope to bring back to life can do so from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tours can begin at any building.
 
Peter Yanson, senior vice president for Quadrelle Realty Services, and Matt Marks, senior vice president, Tower Investments LLC, opened Friday's event with a PowerPoint presentation. Yanson said QRS acts as the property management agency for Tower and IRG.
 
Marks said Tower has more than 100 active real estate projects in 14 states. Yanson said IRG has 70 projects in about 25 states. While Tower Investments is involved in everything from residential to commercial, retail and hotel projects, Yanson said IRG is "basically strictly industrial rehabilitation in a big way."
 
IRG also does a lot of projects at closed military bases. He said the company's goal with facilities such as those in Galesburg is simple.
 
"We try to put tenants in them and try to bring them back to life," he said.
 
The former Maytag plant, 1801 Monmouth Blvd., is now known as the Galesburg Manufacturing Center. While there is now 1.5 million square feet under roof at GMC, that will be changing.
 
"The plan for this complex, we're going over time to demolish quite a bit of building," Yanson said, adding a contract has been signed to demolish the building between buildings 51 and 35. He said that will create an area where trucks will be able to load and unload goods.
 
Yanson pointed to an aerial view of the complex on the screen, showing an area on the southeast portion of the property.
 
"All of this up here, by and large that was built early in the 20th century," Yanson said. "We'll take that down."
 
While the old Maytag plant can be divided into smaller areas, described as a very flexible facility, Yanson said the remaining 400,000 square feet at the former Maytag Distribution Center, now the Galesburg Distribution Center, can only be divided into 100,000-square-foot sections, although he said, "We'd love to have one, 400,000-square-foot tenant."
 
Dick Blick Art Materials already leases 450,000 square feet of the building. During a tour of the building after the presentation, Marks said the building has an unusual feature that makes it attractive: an indoor rail dock.
 
"The other plus is we have a lot of trailer parking to the west," Marks said.
 
He said the building could be expanded by 200,000 square feet.
 
"The people who would come here are tenants who are tired of paying high Chicago rates," Marks said.
 
He said taxes on the property in Galesburg are about 15 cents per square foot, compared to about $1 a square foot for a similar facility in the Chicago area.
 
"It's a tremendous value," he said.
 
The van, carrying about 13 people, including Galesburg City Manager Dane Bragg, went in and out of a number of buildings at the old Butler plant, now the Galesburg Industrial Center. Companies needing overhead cranes, such as ones moving heavy, metal products should find the facility attractive, the brokers were told, because almost all the building have cranes. They also learned some of the buildings are for sale or lease.
 
Fitting into the distribution mode, when the van tour returned to the old Maytag plant, Marks said of one building, "this could be one of the best distribution buildings in the state of Illinois."
 
"The more people talk about the buildings, the more exposure Galesburg gets and the more exposure the buildings get," Marks said.

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