Sony Hires Sales Team for 468,994-SF Plant

Should it be necessary to separately liquidate the equipment, the real estate will be tagged at $40 million, J. Holmes Davis IV, Binswanger's senior vice president in Dallas, tells GlobeSt.com. He says Binswanger won the race primarily because it has sold eight of 12 chip plants that hit the international market in the last four years.

Davis, who will lead the sales drive, has laid out a strategy to "go to the globe with a very aggressive marketing campaign." He already has identified 2,200 prospects for a mailing. Every packaging from CDs to brochures and print to Internet will be employed to sell One Sony Place, a fully air-conditioned, high-tech plant in San Antonio's fastest growing corridor, the northwest submarket.

The listing is a class 1 semiconductor wafer fabrication facility with two connected buildings. A 217,480-sf fab building has 34,630 sf in a bay-and-chase cleanroom for 6-inch wafer fabrication and 25,023 sf of class 100 space for 5-inch wafer manufacturing. A 214,845-sf building contains a 17,624-sf ballroom-style test room and 143,578 sf of office space with multiple conference rooms, meeting rooms computer learning space and a cafeteria. The 50-acre campus, as one would expect, has a central station with closed circuit TV and fire alarm system monitoring. It is positioned at the intersection of Loop 410 and Military Drive near Interstates 35 and 10 with direct access to the San Antonio International Airport. Developed in 1981 by Advanced Micro Devices, the campus was bought in 1990 by Sony and expanded.

Philips Semiconductors of Sunnyvale, CA, also has a chip manufacturing plant up for grabs in San Antonio, but Davis says it's a different breed--designed for 8-inch to 12-inch wafer fabrication, much like a third semiconductor plant that's on the market in Texas. Atmel Corp. of San Jose, CA, is selling the 624,000-sf former Hitachi site at 6431 Longhorn Dr. in Irving. Worldwide, there are 13 plants on the market. "They will be picked up," he says, noting the industry is much like it was three years ago when he and his team took the Irving complex to market. "We're seeing some positive signs in that industry now."

As for the new listing, Davis says "the good news is there is still a need for 5-inch and 6-inch fab plants." And, there's always the option to take the holding, with location as its main selling point, to a non-traditional buyer.