Port of Chehalis to Potentially Sell 34 Acres to Realty Group for $9.3 Million


By Daniel Warn / dan@chronline.com

The Port of Chehalis Commission recently authorized the sale of a 34-acre industrial site, located on the corner of Rush Road and Jackson Highway, to Clayco Realty Group (CRG) for $9.3 million.

In order for the sale to be finalized, CRG must fulfill the requirements set in an initial 90-day due diligence period, during which the organization will have the right to access the property to conduct necessary surveying and reporting activities such as geotechnical and wetland surveys as well as topographical reports, according to Port Chief Executive Officer Lindsey Senter.

Ted Knapp, vice president of development for CRG in the region, told The Chronicle that CRG also needs to conduct a traffic impact analysis and a cultural resources investigation.

Yet CRG has additional steps it needs to take in order for the sale to be finalized.

“Typically, in order to make a sale final, the buyer will be required to present final building designs as well as an end-user to the commission before they will formalize the sale,” Senter told The Chronicle in a statement. “Before the Commission can authorize the sale of the property, they will require disclosure of an end-user and their industry to ensure that the user will be a good fit for the Port district.”

Knapp said it’s too early in the process to have an end-user attached.

“We’re an industrial developer, and so we’ve got that property under contract. We have no identified users or tenants of the property right now. It would be a speculative — at this point — project,” he said.

A speculative project will not be accepted in a finalized sale, Senter said, since there is no defined end-user for the property or submitted design at the moment.

However, CRG doesn’t technically need to have the end-user and design work done by the end of the 90-day due diligence period.

“The majority of our transactions have 90-day due diligence but also have an option for an extension,” Senter stated. “So in this case, 90 days would be the short version of that timeline but often the required permitting and reporting could also take much longer, and should that be the case they would ultimately have up to the end of 2023 to have everything ready for the final sale.”

And this timeline matches up since CRG wants to have an end-user and its design work submitted before summer 2023.

“The earliest we would do any kind of work there would be, probably, the summer of 2023, just because the soil conditions out there lends itself to be done in the dryer time of the year,” Knapp told The Chronicle. “So we wouldn’t do anything until the dryer conditions of next year. We won’t be far enough this year to do any work on site.”

Senter said the port’s interest in the matter is to increase the capacity of the local economy, and the sale will work to that end.

“The Port of Chehalis exists to promote economic development in our area, selling property to a reputable organization that will bring livable wage jobs to our area will help to foster positive growth in our community,” she stated. “After a sale of property, we like to roll those funds into capital projects and other land improvements that would attract other buyers.”

CRG is a national development company that’s affiliated with Clayco Construction and is headquartered in Chicago with a major presence in St. Louis, though it does work all over the nation.

Locally, CRG has paved the way for Clayco Construction to build a 1.1 million square foot distribution center for Costco in Tumwater off of 93rd Avenue and Interstate 5. Another project it worked on recently was the completion of an Intel campus in DuPont.

“We redid the redevelopment of the Intel campus,” Knapp said. “We took down two office buildings, put up two large industrial buildings and kind of recycled another existing industrial building.”

To learn more about CRG, visit. https://www.realcrg.com/.





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