The former American Sign & Indicator Corp. building complex in Spokane Valley attracted a winning bid of $2.3 million at a public auction earlier this month, says Jim MacDonnell, executive managing director of Sheldon Good & Co., the Chicago-based company that conducted the auction.


The three-building facility is located on a 10.5-acre site at 2310 N. Fancher Way, near Felts Field, and has a total of about 160,000 square feet of office and warehouse space. The buildings are between 30 and 50 years old.


MacDonnell declines to disclose the buyers name until the transaction is completed, which is scheduled to occur Nov. 25. He says, however, that the buyer is a Spokane businessman who plans to move his business into that complex.


Nine bidders vied for the property, which had a starting price of $795,000, MacDonnell says.


It was competitively bid, he says. We had users and investors bidding on the property. As usual, the user won out.


St. Louis real estate investor Mark Lucas sold the complex after holding it as an investment for a number of years.


The complex has been largely vacant since 2001, when Spokane-based computer-printer maker Output Technology Corp. moved its operations out of one of the buildings there and into the Spokane Business & Industrial Park, at 3808 N. Sullivan. Output Technology had been located there for about 10 years.


Previously, American Sign & Indicator, the Spokane company that invented the alternating time-and-temperature display sign, had its operations in that complex. That company was sold in 1983, but maintained some operations here into the 1990s.