The former Royal Caribbean call center in Springfield, the largest empty office building in Lane County, is officially on the market, and offers in the vicinity of $18 million will be considered.
Work is ongoing at the 160,000-square-foot Gateway building to repair the damage caused in 2023 by thieves who ripped out heavy-gauge copper electrical wiring and copper HVAC piping throughout the building.
The repairs will likely be completed by the fall, says Alan Evans, a broker with Eugene-based Evans Elder Brown & Seubert, the commercial real estate brokerage that has the listing on behalf of the owner, New Jersey-based Hampshire Real Estate.
The listing went live about a month ago.
“There has been serious and sincere interest” in the complex, Evans says. Hampshire hasn’t set an exact asking price and will consider offers of roughly $18 million and up, Evans says.
The place likely won’t be used as a call center again, as that industry has largely quit the United States, says Evans.
“It won’t be used for what it was originally built,” he says, adding that the facility “can be repurposed.”
A buyer might remodel it into a number of separate office suites. But that could be tricky because the building consists mainly of large open areas with vaulted ceilings, where hundreds of workers once handled cruise-booking calls for Miami-based Royal Caribbean.
Such conversions can be done, however.
The Baker family, owners of the former Register-Guard complex on Chad Drive in Eugene, faced that challenge when they sold the RG newspaper business in 2018 and the new owner of the business later vacated the Chad building.
Over the years, the family has carved the roughly 100,000-square-foot office wing into a half-dozen office suites that are leased out. Separately, the complex’s former printing press building and newspaper distribution center are now being turned into a climbing gym.
Hampshire Real Estate has been in no hurry to sell the Gateway Royal Caribbean building. A developer completed the facility in 2005, and the cruise company signed a 20-year lease for it. Hampshire bought the property in 2008, with Royal Caribbean in its binding lease as a tenant through 2026. Although Royal Caribbean shut its operation there in 2019, the cruise company has had to continue paying rent to Hampshire, as well as property taxes, insurance and utilities. Royal Caribbean or its insurer are paying for the copper-theft repairs, estimated at $6 million.
The property consists of the building and parking lots sitting on 21.6 acres.
The Lane County Assessor’s Office puts the market value of the 21.6 acres of land at $10.4 million. The building and parking lots had a market value of $7.5 million before the copper theft. The theft made the building unusable and reduced its value to close to zero.
Clarification
The Lane Regional Air Protection Agency says it has not made any calculations about the specific pollutant emissions of the proposed distribution center on Highway 99 in Eugene.
In an initial public notification in early July about the proposed facility’s air pollution impact, LRAPA listed specific pollution emissions, such as particulates and formaldehyde. Eugene Weekly included those numbers in a July 10 article about the proposed facility. However, the agency subsequently said it issued those numbers in error, is not required to make such calculations for this project, and has withdrawn them.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.