New Mill Capital, LLC, a California-based company that buys surplus industrial and commercial properties and adapts them for resale and reuse, has completed another round of auctions for equipment at the former Kaiser Aluminum Corp. Mead Works smelter as of late last week.

The company's long-term plan is to turn much of the sprawling 184-acre site into an industrial park. However, it has the former Kaiser property—it includes 262 buildings ranging in size from 1,000 feet to more than 100,000-square feet of space—listed for sale or lease on its website, separate from the equipment-auction activity it is pursuing simultaneously.

The company has auctioned off almost 200 lots of equipment from the former carbon anode facility, a building that was constructed in the complex at 2111 E. Hawthorne in the late 1990s. Tim Watters, principal, says auctions officially ended Friday. Lots ranged in price from $10 for equipment such as safety switches to $36,000 for blasting equipment used to clean machinery.

Watters declines to disclose details about the latest bids New Mill Capital has received for the property up for auction, but says it has received at least one bid on almost all of the auction lots, adding that he has seen a good amount of interest in the lots.

Watters says once the auctions close, buyers have about 24 hours to pay. Buyers are then expected to pick up the auctioned item as soon as possible.

"We thought there may be an opportunity to market the anode plant," Watters says, when asked why the stand-alone facility wasn't being marketed for sale with the rest of the site. The company exhausted its effort to sell the facility, Watters says, so it decided to conduct an auction to sell off the individual components and generate revenue, to be put toward remediation and demolition costs. The building is expected to be demolished, he says. Other buildings on the property had already gone through that equipment auction process earlier this year, he says.

"Our goal is to eventually bring a lot more life to the property," says Gregory Schain, principal and executive vice president for New Mill Capital.

The company is a subsidiary of Industrial Realty Group LLC, a real estate development and investment enterprise based in Downey, Calif. Industrial Realty Group says it owns over 80 million square feet of floor space at 100 properties in 25 states.

New Mill Capital purchased the overall site earlier this year for $1.5 million, Schain says. Since the purchase, Watters says it has focused on auctioning off aluminum-production equipment and other machining equipment on the site.

All 262 buildings combined have more than 1.6 million square feet of floor space. Schain says much of that square footage and building space won't be immediately usable.

"A lot of them are really unusable because of what their former function was," Schain says of buildings on the site. "Those will eventually come down so the site will be redeveloped."

He says of that building space, only about 200,000 square feet is actually able to be renovated at this point. Unusable buildings will come down and other buildings that may be usable in their current form will remain. Depending on market demand for the site, Schain says additional industrial space beyond the current buildable square footage can be developed if a company shows interest.

"There's a lot of land," he says. "There's plenty of room down the road, once we clear the site, to build to suit."

He hopes that within the next two years, the site will be completely cleared and ready for redevelopment as an industrial park.

"We obviously have a long way to go before we get there, but we obviously have good momentum, and we're under way," Schain says.

He says it doesn't have any long-term leases signed for buildings on the site, but says New Mill Capital has leased out several spaces there on a short-term basis, mostly for storage space.

Schain says the immediate goal is to clear the site. Many of the buildings on the site can't be bulldozed because of their potential health and safety risks. He says that it takes time to test and gather data about building safety and once all that information is gathered, demolition and remediation will begin.

"There are some areas of the site that have no remediation issues that can come down, and that will probably start pretty soon," he says.

Kaiser Aluminum hasn't operated the Mead Works smelter for more than a decade. Commercial Development Co., of St. Louis, bought the property in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in 2004 for $7.4 million and had continued to sell off equipment and materials there until selling the site to New Mill Capital.