Farber buys Andersons’ former site on Far East Side
The second of the two former Andersons store locations has been purchased by Farber Specialty Vehicles, which plans to move manufacturing operations to the site at 5800 Alshire Road within several weeks.
Farber Specialty, which makes everything from firetrucks to bookmobiles, purchased the 137,000square foot building on 16 acres just off Brice Road from the Andersons for $2.15 million, according to the Franklin County auditor’s site.
Company owner Ken Farber said the location and visibility of the property were perfect for Farber Specialty, which has been based less than two miles away at 7052 Americana Parkway.
He said the site, at 5800 Alshire Road, is already zoned for manufacturing use, and he has a deal to lease Farber’s current site to another firm, which he declined to name, once the move takes place.
“We’re talking to the city and an architect now” about investing in an expansion of the Andersons building, Farber said. He said the
ceiling height in some parts of the building needs to be raised to accommodate the large trucks the company works on.
Farber pointed out that the area is in a city of Columbus Enterprise Zone, which offers partial property tax exemptions for up to
10 years in exchange for investments of $1 million or more.
As part of the move and expansion, Farber said he expects to hire 20 to 30 more people in the coming year in addition to his current workforce of about 115.
The sale is a piece of good news for the Brice Road area, which has many retailers exit during the past decade. Realestate experts said after the
Andersons stores closed in June that they expected both properties would sell quickly and would be repurposed for uses other than retail.
The other Columbus Andersons store off Sawmill Road was recently sold to Preferred Living, which plans to build 614 apartments on the 17-acre site.
DETROIT — The new CEO of Ford Motor Co. says the company isn’t taking its eyes off the present as it prepares for transportation in the future.
Jim Hackett, who replaced Mark Fields in May, says new mobility projects such as buying a shuttle company and the purchase of an artificial intelligence startup have not taken money from car and truck development.
Responding to criticism from dealers and investors about an aging product lineup, Hackett says that more new vehicles are in the pipeline. Dealers don’t know everything the company is planning, Hackett said in a brief interview with The Associated Press. “We think dealers are really going to be happy with the vehicles we’ve got coming this year and what we’ve got in the hopper,” he said, without giving specifics.
Ford’s U.S. sales were down 4 percent through July and its market share has slipped 0.3 percentage points, causing investors and dealers to worry about the company’s product decisions. While Ford’s top-seller, the F-Series pickup, was recently updated with a new aluminum body, other important bread-andbutter products such as the Fusion sedan and Escape SUV have grown dated. Ford has lagged rivals in long-range electric cars, and while subcompact SUV sales are booming, Ford doesn’t plan to roll out an entry in that market until next year.
Successful CEOs always have to prepare for the future and take care of the present, Hackett said from the San Francisco area, where he was to attend a Ford symposium Thursday on helping cities handle increasing traffic with technology and better transportation options.
Although people in cities have more transport choices such as ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft, Hackett predicted that personal car ownership will survive. People already own vehicles and prefer to drive them knowing that they aren’t used 90 percent of the time, Hackett said. “I’m not ready to admit that Ford is facing a world where it’s losing a lot of personal buyers,” he said. “But I would admit that they’re going to have a lot more options.”
In September, Ford bought Chariot, an appbased shuttle service that originally operated 100 14-passenger vans in the San Francisco area. Since then it’s tripled the fleet and expanded to New York, Seattle and Austin, Texas. The company also is investing $1 billion in a budding robotics startup, Argo AI, to acquire more expertise for autonomous vehicles.
Hackett said spending on the future is small compared with how much Ford spends on car and truck development.