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NEWARK — The Longaberger Co. plans to sell or lease parts of its manufacturing campus near Frazeysburg, a company spokesman confirmed Thursday.
Colliers International, a global real estate company, lists nine Longaberger buildings, totaling more than 1.5 million square feet, as vacant and for sale. The Longaberger Homestead, a retail and entertainment center next to the manufacturing facility, is not for sale.
Russell Mack, a company spokesman, said not all of the buildings are vacant and not all are necessarily for sale, but the company hopes to sell or lease about three or four of them.
“The main manufacturing facility is not part of the space being listed,” Mack said. “We don’t need as much space as is available.
“There is no effect on our manufacturing and no change in our manufacturing. We want to make the most efficient use of our space.”
The company could move parts of its manufacturing operation to different buildings, making any of the listed buildings available for interested buyers, Mack said.
“Our operation keeps getting more and more efficient and easy to shift around,” Mack said. “We feel really good about 2012. It just doesn’t make sense to have a lot of excess space just sitting there.”
The listings include seven buildings in the Ohio 16 Logistics Park, including 880,000-square-foot Building B, 510,000-square-foot Building F and 125,000-square-foot Building E. The three large buildings were built in 1993, 1994 and 2000.
Two other buildings listed are the Raiders Road Command Center (9,440 square feet) and the Raiders Road Office and Recreation Center (18,070 square feet).
“This is all part of the 2011 plan,” Mack said. “Earlier in the year, we took a look at the space. The bottom line of it is it’s excess space.
“There is a huge amount of capacity of space there, and large amounts of it are in use.”
The famous basket-maker, which once employed more than 8,000 and dropped to about 886 earlier this year, has given up some of its property and operations in recent years.