A newspaper printing and distribution plant in Plano has sold for $43.5 million.
DallasNews Corporation, parent company of the Dallas Morning News, sold the property to Florida-based Denago EV, a low-speed vehicle company that specializes in electric golf carts, the outlet reported. The sale pencils out to about $70 per square foot.
Denago plans to use the 29-acre, 620,000-square-foot facility at 3900 West Plano Parkway as a manufacturing hub, joining a growing list of companies establishing production lines in North Texas. DallasNews, formerly known as A.H. Belo Corporation, has owned the property since 1999, county records show.
It downsized its printing plant with a five-year lease valued at $3.5 million for a 67,600-square-foot facility in Carrollton last June, according to its latest quarterly report. The property’s address was not disclosed.
Proceeds from the sale will be used to fully fund the company’s remaining pension obligations, with plans to transfer the pension to an insurance company. The pension’s balance stood at about $16 million late last year, and the transfer would remove the liability from the company’s balance sheet, it said.
DallasNews’ pension expenses have been rising, with $1.42 million spent on net periodic pension and post-employments benefits in the first nine months of last year, more than double the $674,000 spent during the same period in 2023, the report said.
The company said last year it was moving to shed assets and return to profitability by moving to the smaller printing plant with fewer workers to save an estimated $5 million a year.
The company has been selling off real estate assets since 2019, when it offloaded its historic downtown Dallas office building at 508 Young Street to developer Ray Washburne
In February, Washburne said he was selling to “one of the major data companies” to bring a data center to the 546,000-square-foot property, throwing a wrench in the city’s intentions to integrate it into its larger convention center redevelopment plan. The deal is slated to close in April, Washburne said.
— Judah Duke
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