News alert for brewpub fans: The shuttered Elk Horn Brewery property on East Broadway in Eugene has sold!
And the new owner is… Diamond Parking Inc., the Seattle-based parking-lot giant.
Whaaat?
But the purchase is not as odd as might appear. Diamond is well known for running parking lots. Much less known is that the family-owned company invests in residential and retail real estate. Diamond is a notable landlord and developer in Eugene.
Diamond’s purchase last month of the Elk Horn property at East Broadway and Hilyard Street (for $1,832,000, according to the deed) is just the latest investment deal here by Diamond.
What will Diamond do with the site? “We’re looking for a long-term tenant to go in there and lease the building, some sort of business, so we’re going to be searching for that,” says Chuck Harvison, Diamond’s regional vice president for Oregon.
The longtime owners of the Elk Horn building, Eugene-based members of the Giustina family, had the vacant property on the market for nearly a year, asking $2.6 million, the listings show. Brokers touted it as a “redevelopment opportunity.” There were rumors of a student housing high-rise replacing the 6,000-square-foot two-story building.
The Diamond empire
Diamond’s signs are ubiquitous in Eugene. The company owns or runs about 30 parking lots in the city, Diamond’s website shows.
But the Diamond family is also a major landlord. This year, it completed construction of the 11th and Ferry Lofts, a 65-unit five-story student housing development near East 11th Avenue and Patterson Street, four blocks from the University of Oregon.
Diamond also built and owns the Hilyard Townhomes, a three-story 24-unit student housing complex immediately south of the Elk Horn property. Diamond built that in 2011, records show.
Other Diamond holdings include the retail building leased to The Kiva Grocery downtown, and the two-building Uptown Plaza retail strip mall on Coburg Road near Sheldon High School that Diamond bought in 2016 for $5.8 million, according to the deed.
Founded in 1922, privately-held Diamond claims to be the oldest parking company in the world. Its hub is Seattle-Tacoma, where it manages or owns hundreds of parking facilities.
The Elk Horn brewpub business was owned by Stephen and Colleen Sheehan. In their 10 years running the eatery, they faced problems, including vandalism, criticism for their involvement, together with right-wing social media influencer Rick Dancer, with an anti-homeless group called Eugene Wake Up, restrictions during the COVID pandemic, and the same financial squeeze that many small craft breweries endure, news reports say.
PeaceHealth update
Bricks $ Mortar in July broke the story that Georgia-based housing developer Landmark Properties wants to buy and knock down the old PeaceHealth’s University District hospital building and construct what would be Eugene’s largest student housing complex.
Here are new details:
Landmark would also buy a nearby five-story 432-space parking garage from PeaceHealth, according to an August 12 PeaceHealth memorandum reviewed by Eugene Weekly.
The memo shows that PeaceHealth and Landmark have been working on this deal since at least May. The memo says the sides on May 22 signed a purchase agreement. The memo, signed by PeaceHeath Chief Strategy Officer Mike Dwyer, is intended to notify “third parties” about the existence of the purchase agreement.
Typically, in real estate deals large or small, the sides haggle and then sign a purchase agreement that includes the price and gives the buyer a set amount of time to inspect the property and carry out other “due diligence” work. If the buyer still wants to proceed, the next step is closing the sale.
The August 12 memo doesn’t include what Landmark would pay or how much time it has for due diligence.
Landmark’s draft plans that Bricks $ Mortar reported on in July didn’t mention acquiring a parking garage, although Landmark did note it would need parking for the student housing complex. The garage it wants to buy is on the southwest corner of Hilyard Street and 13th Avenue. It’s a colossal hunk of concrete totaling 127,000 square feet, built by PeaceHealth in 1980 to serve the now-defunct University District hospital.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.