By Alex Gary - April 18th 2024
BELOIT
Negotiations have come to a halt on one of the largest industrial vacancies in the Stateline Area, while another noticeable empty building will be put up for auction at the end of May.
Sonya Hoppes, South Beloit city administrator, verified that the city is no longer negotiating with Regal Rexnord to buy the 115,000-square-foot building at 449 Gardner St.
“The city certainly has many needs for suitable spaces — streets, police, library and city hall — and the 449 Gardner property was of interest,” Hoppes said in an email. “Unfortunately, the parties could not come to terms.”
Regal Rexnord became owner of the Gardner building, which was for years home to Warner Electric, in March of 2023 when it bought Altra Industrial Motion.
It’s one of two Regal Rexnord buildings being sold by Coldwell Banker Commercial McGuire Mears & Associates of Janesville. The Gardner Street property has a list price of $3 million. McGuire Mears & Associates also is marketing Regal Rexnord’s former Beloit headquarters at 200 State St. The asking price for that property is $1.56 million.
Bill Mears of McGuire Mears said there’s been no activity yet on the building that was for years headquarters for Regal Beloit Corp. The city of Beloit, of course, is eager to see the building sold.
“The city of Beloit would welcome a new occupant in that space and encourages the company to sell the property to an investor who is committed to the success of Beloit,” said Sarah Lock, Beloit’s director of strategic communications.
The State Street property essentially has been empty since March 2020. Regal Beloit had most of its administrative staff working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic and the workers were never fully brought back before the 2021 deal where Regal Beloit bought the Process & Motion Control segment from Rexnord Corp., creating Regal Rexnord. Last September, Regal Rexnord officially moved the company headquarters to Milwaukee.
McGuire Mears & Associates also has been trying to sell the 801 W. Rockton Road building in Rockton, Ill., that was the headquarters of Chemtool Inc.
Chemtool moved out of that building after the June 2021 massive fire that destroyed its chemical and lubricants manufacturing plant on Prairie Hill Road.
The West Rockton Road building was built in 1977 and served as a research and test facility for Woodward Inc. for more than 20 years. In 2009, Woodward sold the building to Chemtool, a division of Ohio-based Lubrizol Corp.
Mears said the West Rockton Road building has been on the market for more than a year and was a difficult project to sell.
“It’s not really set up well for manufacturing,” Mears said. “It’s more of a R&D (research and development) center/commercial office building and there’s not a big market for that right now.”
The West Rockton Road property is slated to be sold at auction beginning on May 28 on Tex-X.com, an online commercial real estate exchange. The opening bid for the nearly 110,000-square-foot building on 31 acres is $900,000.
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