Casco Bay Steel purchases steel fabrication plant for $3M
Courtesy/ NAI The Dunham Group
The former Megquier & Jones steel fabrication plant, at 1156 Broadway in South Portland.
Courtesy / NAI The Dunham Group
An aerial view of the 1156 Broadway parcel in South Portland.
SOUTH PORTLAND — Casco Bay Steel Structures’ $3 million purchase of the former Megquier & Jones steel fabrication plant, at 1156 Broadway, gives the company valuable railroad access to ship fabricated steel bridge girders from the Turners Island Marine-Rail terminal on Portland Harbor.
Rail access is expected to save the company time and money, open new markets and double annual production within five years, said Bryon Tait, Casco Bay Steel’s founder and president.
“We’ll use the property to expand our existing business to make steel bridges in markets now encompassing New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania," Tait said. “We’re very busy, we needed more space, and this site became available — so we gobbled it up. We’ll put it back to work and hopefully put quite a few jobs back in.”
The building, formerly occupied by the steel-fabrication company Megquier & Jones, dates to 1965 and was showing some wear. The siding and roof had deteriorated over the years and the building had little insulation overall. Tait’s crew is installing a new roof and new siding, both with insulation. New lighting is also being installed.
Strategic purchase
Tom Dunham from NAI The Dunham Group brokered the sale on behalf of Casco Bay Steel Structures. The deal closed May 10. Mark Malone from Malone Commercial Brokers represented the seller, Wayland, Mass.-based Stanmar Corp. Stanmar is the real estate holding company for the Jones family, which owned the property and leased the premises to Megquier & Jones, said Dunham.
Tait put a purchase option on the property at the end of October. Megquier & Jones closed its business in December, then sublet the site to Tait so he could get in there on Jan. 1, before the purchase closed, to begin rehab work. Building and site improvements are expected to cost close to $1 million.
Twelve employees are in there now, and Tait expects to have 25 at the site by late fall. Overall, he employs about 120.
Founded in 1895, Megquier & Jones was the long-time supplier and fabricator of structural steel in southern Maine, providing steel for the pulp and paper industry, bridges, parking garages, schools, pedestrian walkways and hydroelectric stations. Tait founded Casco Bay Steel Structures in 1997 to make steel for road and railroad bridges. He has a 55,000-square-foot plant at 75 Spring Hill Road in Saco, and in 2011 expanded into an empty 95,000-square-foot facility at 1 Wallace Ave. in South Portland. That expansion gave Casco Bay Steel a total of 150,000 square feet of fabrication space with 100 tons of lifting capacity on 30 acres of property. It enabled the company to handle multiple jobs at once and go after bigger projects throughout New England and New York.
With the purchase of 1156 Broadway, Casco Bay Steel has an additional 75,712-square-foot plant, on 15.4 acres, with overhead self-contained 10-ton bridge cranes and its own rail spur to facilitate direct trucking. The rail continues onto the Turners Island Marine-Rail terminal, so the company can ship huge bridge components on barges to Boston and southern New England.
Strong demand
The sale illustrates the demand for industrial parcels in Greater Portland, where the vacancy rate is 3% and companies increasingly looking for space further afield.
“As the industrial inventory gets tighter and tighter around Southern Maine and Portland, people are looking to Lewiston/Auburn and up the interstate,” said Dunham.
That means that situations like the purchase and continued use of the Megquier & Jones plant is a rarity for southern Maine.
“The real plus is that, from the approval perspective, this is a continuation of the same use,” said Dunham. “If it had gone to retail development, it would have been one or two years going through the approval process. This is the continuation of similar use and high-paying manufacturing jobs, which are few and far between around Portland. It’s very significant.”
A major project on the books now at Casco Bay Steel is construction of six massive box girders, each 100 feet long and weighing 280,000 pounds, for Cianbro’s replacement of the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge over the Piscataqua River. The new site will facilitate transportation of the girders, said Tait, who expected plenty more work for the foreseeable future.
“Infrastructure throughout the country is in dire need of being rebuilt,” he said. “Right now, we have two years worth of work on the books.”
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