Ford puts 4 properties, 90 acres, up for sale
Benihana building among Dearborn sites
Ford Motor Co. has put up for sale four properties in the Dearborn area, including a restaurant, totaling an estimated 90 acres, the Free Press confirmed Sunday.
In addition, the 117-year-old automaker is reviewing the possibility of consolidating facilities and selling properties that have housed employees in the Dearborn, Taylor, Dearborn Heights and Allen Park areas since the 1950s.
Additional details will be shared with employees and announced publicly as plans evolve in coming months.
Specifically, the company is looking to possibly sell or end leases on up to 35 properties to increase efficiency on its new campus as COVID-19 shapes workplace needs and expectations.
“We’ve been evaluating dozens of configurations as part of the master planning for Ford’s Dearborn campus transformation,” said Dave Dubensky, chairman and CEO of Ford Land. “These scenarios allow us to envision how and where our employees could work over the next decade and help us evolve our real estate portfolio, creating a more densified campus.”
While this property evaluation is part of a long term master plan for the company, the coronavirus has sped up the process for potential changes.
“The pandemic highlighted many learnings on the future of how we work, and like you’ve seen with other companies, we expect an increase in employees who will prefer working remotely longer-term, which allows us to centralize more people on one campus and consolidate underutilized buildings in the Dearborn area,” Dubensky said.
Ford unveiled plans Sept. 19, 2019, for its most sweeping redesign of its corporate campus in at least half a century, changes meant to one day “create new work environments for some 20,000 of its workers and open the campus to the public. At the heart of the plan is the creation of three large interconnected buildings with enough square footage to fill
three Renaissance Centers, located on a more than 300-acre campus thick with trees and natural features.”
Benihana site for sale
The master plan was released in 2016 with the goal of finishing by 2025. Former CEO Jim Hackett asked the team to reexamine building use during his tenure, which ran from May 2017 to October 2020, said Ford spokeswoman Marisa Bradley.
At Ford, the four properties that are for sale:
Benihana restaurant building, not h the franchise, at 18601 Hubbard Drive, in Dearborn and adjacent land listed as 240 Town Center, Dearborn.
Rotunda Fields, located at Rotunda h
Drive and Schaefer Road, in Dearborn.
Fairlane Green, located at Oakwood h
Boulevard and Fairlane Drive in Allen Park.
Lundy Parkway Drive property at h
Lundy Parkway and Greenfield Road in Dearborn.
Bradley declined to provide prices for the parcels, saying inquiries from serious buyers may be directed to a commercial property broker.
Demolition underway
Changes to the current Ford campus are already underway with the demolition of the Product Development Center showroom building off Oakwood Boulevard near the Greenfield Village entrance.
Decisions now will define how the Ford campus looks by 2030.
Having thousands of workers spread out over multiple cities can be exceptionally
challenging, Bradley said.
Currently, Ford owns 90 buildings in the Dearborn and Allen Park areas, she said.
“We have a chance now to optimize our footprint and prepare our workers to deliver in this new era, support the community and be a part of Dearborn,” Bradley said.
The future product development campus will include not just designers and engineers but also marketing, data and analytics and other specialties. All those people, ideally, would be on one campus, she said.
‘Start soon’
“COVID certainly played a role. It shifts the demand on how much real estate we’ll really need,” Bradley said. “But we have employees who are already back, designers and engineers. We know we have a big group of employees who can’t wait to be back and they’re tired of remote work.”
Worker flexibility will be key, she said. Ford will start soon the process of relocating workspaces for employees through consolidation. The new building project won’t be ready to accept relocated workers until late 2022 or early 2023, Bradley said.
“We’ve done think tanks with employees, even virtually,” Bradley said. “Employees’
preferences are shifting to not having to drive to the office five days a week. People are more comfortable with video conferences and digital collaboration now.”
Home until summer
In April, Ford said it planned to have its workers remain off site until the end of June or start of July in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
In June, Ford told an estimated 30,000 salaried employees that they could choose whether to work from home full-time, return to the office fulltime or create a blended schedule that allows for both.
While Ford did say in June that it was looking at space needs, the amount of sale property or specific goals had not been determined, Bradley said.
“The workplace you left is not the workplace you’re returning to,” Kiersten Robinson, Ford’s chief human resources officer, said June 17. She said off-site teams reported feeling “more efficient, more agile and more flexible.”
She added, “They’re also balancing a lot of personal demands that can be really challenging.”
Use of space will affect both workers and the overall campus, Bradley said. Ford plans to remove the wrought iron gates and fencing that have run along Oakwood Boulevard since the 1950s.
“Ford is going to remove and refurbish them, and integrate them in the new campus but not in the original use for privacy,” Bradley said. “Instead, Ford wants to open up the campus, creating a walkable area for the people of Dearborn, tourists and visitors.”