Kettering land that housed 1,900 Synchrony jobs sold to redeveloper of several area sites
A Kettering Business Park property that formerly housed about 1,900 jobs has been sold for $7.5 million to a firm owning several large Dayton-area tracts of real estate.
Industrial Commercial Properties has bought the 950 Forrer Blvd. site it had under contract, said Dean Miller, ICP’s senior vice president of leasing and acquisitions.
The 36.5-acre former location of Synchrony Financial — one of Kettering’s top employers before it moved out at the end of 2020 — has been sold by F1 Kettering LLC of California to Kettering 950 Forrer LLC of Ohio, Montgomery County land records show.
The price recorded May 6 was about 20% of what the land sold for nearly 16 years ago, according to the auditor’s office website.
Miller said the buyer is an “entity owned by the same” group as ICP. The Cleveland-based redevelopment firm markets about 20 Dayton-area properties totaling more than two million square feet of building space, according to its website.
Aside from several buildings in Kettering and Moraine, they include sites in Beavercreek, Dayton, Fairborn, Miami Twp., Springfield, Vandalia and Xenia.
The two vacant Forrer buildings totaling about 400,000 square feet are among Kettering’s three highest redevelopment priorities, City Manager Mark Schwieterman said recently.
The city this week passed a measure expanding the types of businesses and jobs permitted “so it can be more appropriately and easily redeveloped,” Kettering Planning and Development Director Tom Robillard told city council.
The 950 Forrer land accounts for nearly one third of the 120acre business park, which houses major employers Alternate Solutions, Amazon and Kettering Health, according to city records. Synchrony left as part of a global work-from-home strategy.
“We’re interested in filling the buildings up with tenants that make sense there as soon as we possibly can,” Miller said. “We’ve
got a couple of active conversations going, but no deals yet.”
ICP wants to convert the property “from a single-tenant office building to likely a mix of uses…I would call it light industrial and office-combination type use — some people call those flex buildings,” he added. “We think the buildings lend themselves pretty well to that.”
The land was purchased by F1 Kettering LLC in 2008 for an undisclosed price, county records show. It bought the property from Forward One LLC, which paid $37.9 million for it two years earlier, documents state.