Costco likes buying things in bulk, including, it turns out, Eugene real estate.
The retailing giant is negotiating to buy the 10-acre Oregon Community Credit Union headquarters next to Costco’s Chad Drive store and use some of the site for parking, the credit union says. This, just a year after Costco bought another nearby Chad property that it has said it wants to use for parking.
The popularity of the Chad Drive Costco has turned its parking lots into a perpetual traffic jam. The world’s third-largest retailer seems intent on spending whatever it takes to ease that parking-spot pain.
OCCU, meanwhile, says its 53,000-square-foot 25-year-old Chad Drive headquarters office building is 60 percent empty, mainly because so many non-branch employees now work remotely.
The credit union recently signed a non-binding letter of intent to sell the property to Costco, OCCU said in a statement. Costco did not respond to inquiries from Eugene Weekly. The sides have not publicly released details of the potential transaction. It’s unclear what Costco would do with the office building.
The OCCU property has a market value of $11.7 million, according to the county assessor, and an annual property tax bill of $190,000.
OCCU’s two-story HQ sits at the south end of the 10 acres off Chad Drive. Three-quarters of the OCCU parcel consists of parking lots and an empty field.
Many Costco employees and customers already park in the OCCU parking lot, on weekends when the OCCU HQ is closed. They walk directly from the OCCU lot onto the Costco parking lot near the store’s main entrance. There’s no fence between the two properties, just a narrow strip of trees. Someone’s even laid down a graveled path between the two properties.
“Because the properties are adjacent, we know some Costco employees and customers use portions of the OCCU lot and walk across on the weekends. OCCU has not prohibited that activity as a courtesy and in the spirit of being a good community neighbor,” says OCCU spokesperson Cherie Kistner.
‘Campus employment’ zone
Whether Eugene’s zoning rules would allow the OCCU land to be used officially for a retailer’s parking is also unclear.
The Costco store is in a “community commercial” retailing zone, but the OCCU property is in the Chad Drive “campus employment” zone.
The Eugene City Council, about 40 years ago, designated most of Chad Drive as a “campus” zone for industrial and tech development, hoping it would become a hub for high-paying high-tech, scientific and corporate employers. At that time, Chad was mostly farmland. The zone is supposed to “help achieve economic diversification objectives” by creating dense concentrations of jobs, the code says.
But the hoped-for blue-chip corporations mostly didn’t show up. Under pressure from land owners, the council loosened the zoning a couple of decades later, citing what it called “new market realities.”
The code still bars most retailing in the “campus employment” zone. But the code does appear to allow “campus employment” land to be used for general parking.
Remote world
“Our current headquarters was built for a different era of work, and we have been exploring how to create a smaller, more intentional environment,” OCCU CEO Greg Schumacher says in a statement. “Like many organizations, OCCU experienced a significant shift in how work happens, when non-branch employees moved to remote work in 2020,” he says. “Six years later, our workforce remains largely remote”.
In the event of a sale, “OCCU will remain at its current headquarters during a multi-year transition period.”
OCCU has about 300,000 members. It has 16 brick-and-mortar branches, mostly in Lane County, but also in Roseburg, the Bend-Redmond area, Salem and Corvallis.
Office Depot deal
Desperate for parking space, Costco paid $6 million in August 2025 for a retail building on the north side of Chad that at the time was leased to Office Depot. Office Depot moved out earlier this year, and Costco submitted tentative plans saying it wanted to tear down the empty building and turn the whole parcel into parking.
It’s unclear whether Costco wants to proceed with that demolition, and also buy the OCCU site, or whether Costco would put the demolition on hold if it succeeded in obtaining the OCCU site and using it for parking.
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.