Liberty Lake-based Greenstone Corp. is buying the vacant 250,000-square-foot Agilent Technologies Inc. building there, along with about 70 acres of land, and plans to develop a multibuilding campus on the site called the MeadowWood Technology Office Park.

The property is located on the north side of Mission Avenue east of Molter Road, and Greenstone's purchase of it is expected to close June 14, says Jim Frank, the company's founder and CEO. An affiliated company, probably named MeadowWood Commercial Partners LLC, will be created to administer the property.

Frank declines to say how much Greenstone is paying for the property, but says it had been listed for sale at $10 million, and even at that price—equating to around $40 a square foot just for the Agilent building—would be a bargain.

"It would cost you $150 a square foot" to build a structure here with the unusually high level of infrastructure and amenities that 32-year-old, but extensively remodeled building possesses and that's in the excellent condition it's in, he asserts.

"It's a good opportunity for us, but it's a terrific opportunity for the community," Frank says, adding that he expects the building and the campus setting to have strong appeal to technology companies looking to locate or expand here.

"This is really going to allow the expansion of that technology cluster at Liberty Lake," he says.

It also will revive, though in a smaller, modified version, former property owner Hewlett-Packard Co.'s never realized plan for a multibuilding campus on 100 acres there. Frank says he envisions MeadowWood Technology Office Park, situated on a site zoned for light-industrial use, eventually including as much as 700,000 square feet of space and being home to as many as 4,500 workers.

The former Agilent building and property takes up about 30 acres of the 70-acre site, and Frank says other buildings constructed in the park—likely a mix of owner-occupied and leasable structures—might range in size from 5,000 to 100,000 square feet of floor space. The roughly 1,000 parking spaces already located there is large enough to serve other buildings there as well, he says.

The buildings would need to be constructed in accordance with a master plan that the Greenstone affiliate will develop and that will require approval by the city of Liberty Lake, Frank says.

Space in the former Agilent building will be offered at competitive lease rates, and Frank says, "We've shown the building to at least two large manufacturers that would be from outside this area. There has been a lot of interest in the building."

The two-story structure, which also has a partial basement, is located near the northwest corner of the campus, and Frank anticipates that two to four users ultimately would occupy the structure.

The building has large floor plates for the Spokane area—80,000 square feet of manufacturing space on the main floor and 65,000 of office space on the upper floor—plus 25-foot ceilings and "a high level of infrastructure," such as redundant fiber-optic networks, he says. Large and small conference spaces and a full commercial kitchen and 300-seat cafeteria are located in one of the annexes to the main building, he says. Other amenities include a walking track, fitness center, tennis and basketball courts, a picnic shelter, and an amphitheater, he says.

Kiemle & Hagood Co., of Spokane, will market the space in the building, and NAI Black, of Spokane, will market the rest of the land in the office park, Frank says.

He says Agilent listed the building for sale about six months ago, and because of Greenstone's extensive knowledge of the Liberty Lake market, he quickly began exploring the feasibility of purchasing it. He says he completed a due-diligence review of the property a couple of months ago, and recently waived the last environmental-related contingencies to the sale, allowing the transaction to move forward.

Agilent, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based scientific-instrument maker, said recently that it will close down its Liberty Lake operation by this fall, which will affect about 100 remaining workers there. Those employees have been located in leased space elsewhere here recently.

Agilent is a spinoff of Palo Alto, Calif.-based electronics manufacturer Hewlett-Packard.