A&G Real Estate Partners and Murray Wise Associates announced the receivership sale of a 1.87 million-square-foot greenhouse and agricultural warehouse complex on 151 acres in Paris, Kentucky, as well as a nearby 50,000-square-foot manufacturing and warehouse facility also located in the greater Lexington market.
The sale is being conducted on behalf of Aurora Management Partners, Inc., the Receiver for AgTech Scientific Group, LLC; Color Point, LLC; and other affiliates, as part of a federal receivership case pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Lexington Division. The ultimate sales will be subject to approval by the federal receivership court.
The assets, which are being offered separately, were previously used as part of AgTech Scientific’s large-scale hemp-growing and CBD-production operations in Kentucky.
The JV partners are now issuing a call for offers for the greenhouse complex, while the sealed-bid deadline for the 50,417-square-foot manufacturing and warehouse facility is Tuesday, February 1.
“With the oversupply of hemp in the United States, many CBD producers continue to face challenges in today's marketplace,” noted Emilio Amendola, Co-President of A&G. “Nonetheless, other agricultural companies, as well as healthy hemp and CBD producers, now have the opportunity to acquire high-quality growing and production assets such as these at significantly below replacement value.”
Zoned A-1 Agricultural, the 151-acre parcel at 1077 Cane Ridge Rd. includes multiple greenhouse ranges totaling 1.57 million square feet, along with 155,000-square-feet of warehouse and office space and 150,000 square feet of polytunnels. More specifically, the complex includes a main office/production barn, a shipping building, two storge buildings, and six greenhouse ranges, each of which totals approximately 270,000 to 280,000 square feet. The site’s 13 Gothic-style Quonset buildings each total 11,520 square feet.
With an irrigation system sourced by a large lake on the property, the Bourbon County complex was built in 2001 to grow ornamental flowers and was expanded multiple times through 2018. It was converted to cultivation of hemp for CBD use in 2019. The east side of the greenhouse range features two separate water tank rooms housing a total of three 20,000-gallon tanks and one 100,000-gallon tank.
“Given that the construction sector has been hit particularly hard by the supply-chain crunch and labor shortage, building such a facility from scratch in today’s marketplace would be quite an expensive and uncertain undertaking,” noted Harrison Freeland, Vice President, Murray Wise Associates.
The offsite facility, which was built in 2020, is located on 10 acres at 333 Cleveland Road and is zoned I-1. All told, the facility includes 24,000 square feet of production space, 22,000 square feet of warehouse, and 4,500 square feet of office space. Features include two dock high doors, a drive-in door, steel/masonry construction, and construction up to the C1D2 fireproof standard.
“This is an FDA Current Good Manufacturing Practice facility,” noted Jamie Coté, Senior Managing Director of Real Estate Sales at A&G. “Located within a Bourbon County industrial park, the building is suited to a wide array of manufacturing users.”
Both sites are strategically located to give users access to a massive industrial and consumer market, Coté, added. “Lexington is within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population, and Kentucky is located at the center of a 34-state distribution area, with borders that are within 600 miles of more than 65 percent of the nation’s population,” he said.
In addition, Kentucky is well served by 20 interstates and major highways, major rail networks, barge traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, five commercial airports and dozens of regional airports.
Along with its subsidiaries, Champaign, Ill.-based Murray Wise Associates has managed over $780 million in farmland assets and sold over $925 million in agricultural assets.