"Typically, Great Southwest is a big building market," says Clyde McKinney, senior vice president in Grubb & Ellis Co.'s Dallas office. He has negotiated the deal for seller Chief Automotive Systems, based in Grand Island, NE. Grubb & Ellis' Bill Vaughan, vice president, and Jon Magee, associate, have represented buyer Alliance Telecom Inc. "You just don't run into a lot of buildings this size," McKinney tells GlobeSt.com. "There are some down there, but usually they aren't available." The property has been on the market about six months.

Chief Automotive Systems uses the property, and will continue to do so until September, as a southwest US training site. The Nebraska firm had three such sites in the US and has sold all of them, says McKinney. Alliance has leased the building back to the seller as it plots its October relocation from a Grand Prairie leased site.

The buy is situated on 1.2 acres, one of the larger tracts for a building of this size in the massive multi-building industrial park. "It's a nice little owner-occupy type of building," says McKinney. The 14-year-old structure, built for Chief Automotive Systems, is located at 2545 114th St.

Smaller freestanding buildings are a relatively hot item in the market. McKinney says it's not uncommon to have a land deal scuttled because takers for acre lots back out after calculating costs to build what they want and need in a building. Contractors quite often are busy with larger projects and costs are running nearly $100 per sf in the metroplex. "People want to own their own buildings, but it's extremely expensive to build a building like this," he explains.