The announcement did not offer terms of the acquisition. Kettering 950 Forrer LLC — an LLC for Cleveland developer Industrial Commercial Properties — bought 950 Forrer in May 2022 for $7.5 million. New public records should reflect the latest purchase in coming days.
The 47-acre site accounts for nearly one third of the 120-acre Kettering Business Park.
“These buildings are key to continuing our explosive growth and overcoming supply chain challenges,” said CBC/CTS Chief Executive Christopher Graham. “If we needed six months of everything for production needs, we would need roughly 160,000 square feet of warehouse space. 950 Forrer provides that today and will allow for additional growth over the next 10 years.”
The purchase will create jobs as CBC/CTS renovates the buildings, the center said. No precise planned employment number for the property was given Tuesday.
CBC is hiring with multiple shift openings in the Dayton and Kettering area. “As we continue to grow, we will continue to hire more people,” Graham said.
The tissue center achieved more than 1 million grafts distributed in 2022. “We now distribute more grafts for surgery than any other tissue center in the world,” the CEO said.
Synchrony was the first private tenant at the Kettering Business Park, a location the city redeveloped after the federal government closed Gentile Air Station in the mid-1990s. The federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process placed Gentile on a military base closure list and moved the Defense Electronics Supply Center to Columbus in late 1996, emptying the site of employment.
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Synchrony pulled some 1,900 jobs ― with an annual payroll of some $100 million — from the site when its lease expired late that year, leaving the city of Kettering with a “significant decline in our tax revenue,” City Manager Schwieterman acknowledged in September that year.
Synchrony’s workforce had been working remotely for some time by that point.
The business park opened in 1997, and the Air Force turned over the final building to Kettering in 2013. Forward One LLC bought the property in 2008.
Solon, Ohio’s Industrial Commercial Properties — an active Dayton-area developer that has been involved in properties from Moraine to Kettering and beyond — bought the site in 2022.
The Community Tissues Services organization has seen strong growth in recent years. In 2018, it broke ground at Miami Valley Research Park in a 132,000-square-foot expansion that was expected to create some 200 new jobs.
Doubling the organization’s footprint, the 2018 expansion made room for 16 new clean rooms for processing, distribution and supply chain management.
That facility, also in Kettering, was said to be the main processing center of the Community Tissue Services network across the United States, officials said at the time.
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