Amgen lists Longmont campus for $85M, begins auctioning off equipment

LONGMONT — As it gears up to exit Colorado by the end of the year, California-based pharmaceutical company Amgen Inc. this week is auctioning off unneeded equipment from its 70-acre Longmont campus, which was recently placed on the market for an asking price of $85 million.

In an auction run by Heritage Global Partners that began Tuesday and runs through Wednesday afternoon, Amgen is selling everything from microscopes to hazardous materials bags to spill crates, to the highest bidders.

A spokesperson for Amgen said the company will have a couple more of the auctions by the end of the year as it gets closer to shutting down the facility completely.

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Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., announced last summer that it was closing two sites in Washington state as well as its Longmont and Boulder facilities. At the time, the company employed 430 people between the two Colorado sites. Amgen spokeswoman Kristen Davis said the company’s headcount in Boulder County as of January was 335. That number has likely shrunk in the interim as the company continues scaling back locally.

Amgen owns its Longmont campus, which sits at the northwest corner of Nelson and Airport roads. The property is being listed by Binswanger senior vice president Eric Dienstbach. The campus includes six buildings that total 692,000 square feet, including a manufacturing building, utilities plant, two quality control labs, a central warehouse and an administrative/office building.

In addition to the campus, Amgen also owns 159 adjacent acres of vacant land to the west that are being co-listed by Binswanger and DTZ for $9 million. Amgen also owns its smaller site in northeast Boulder, but Binswanger is not listing that property.

Dienstbach said he anticipates that most of the Longmont Amgen campus would be available for a buyer to take possession by the end of this year. He said the goal is to sell the entire campus as one piece to a single user, but said there are backup-plan scenarios that could include multiple users leasing space while someone else bought the entire property.

Dienstbach, who specializes in listing large corporate campuses, said that in general, the expectation for such properties is that it can take about two years to find a buyer. But he said there are some cases where it can happen much faster if the right user surfaces. He said the ideal buyers that would be targeted first would be other pharmaceutical companies that could utilize the lab spaces and manufacturing facilities. Other technology companies, though, could also find the campus to be a good fit, he said.

“We’ve been lucky in some, where we’ve turned them in six months,” Dienstbach said. “As a rule of thumb, the bigger and more complex and specialized, the longer it takes.”