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Five huge grading machines stirred up dust at the site for a new Precor exercise equipment factory, a sign that some promises are kept even in the worst of times.

The company based in Washington state is moving a factory from California to the Rock Creek Center east of Greensboro and plans to hire 142 workers when it opens in the fall.

It wasn’t always such a sure thing.

Precor was in the final stages of working out deals with the developer to build the plant — and a deal for $294,000 in incentives from the Guilford Board of Commissioners — when the gravity of the economic meltdown began sinking in.

“In November, they gave serious consideration to delaying the project, but they decided they needed to move forward,” said Richard Beard, a partner with developer Simpson Schulman & Beard.

Precor delayed a California project instead. The company says it will save money on shipping costs here because 60 percent of its business for exercise machines is east of the Mississippi River.

Precor makes such familiar machines as the elliptical trainers found in many gyms and YMCAs. It will make weight training machines in Greensboro.

Beard’s company has local investors and an $11 million loan from BB&T to build the plant. The 236,500-square-foot building, plus Precor’s manufacturing equipment, will put $24 million onto county tax rolls.

Simpson Schulman will lease the building to Precor, which will operate a 25,000-square-foot office on the site complete with a fitness center/showroom for its products.

The office will be certified to the highest environmental design standards and include a variety of energy-efficient features.
Precor’s building, at the west end of the industrial park on Millstream Road off Interstate 40, will be a high-profile tenant for Rock Creek, seen by 90,000 motorists a day, Beard said. The Red Oak brewery sits at the park’s eastern end, also highly visible on the interstate. Rock Creek’s tenants also include Lenovo and Qualicaps.

The 1,400-acre park also includes some casualties of the recession. A warehouse that Procter & Gamble once occupied sits empty, and Pass & Seymour Legrand is closing its factory for electrical wiring devices later this year, idling 143 workers. Nearby, gap-toothed suburban neighborhoods are what’s left after Pierce Homes of Carolina stopped building when it went out of business last year.

Beard’s company is not responsible for those sites, which are owned by other companies. But the former local economic developer says Rock Creek is well-positioned to fill up when the economy comes back.

With about 530 vacant acres left for building, the park will benefit from Greensboro’s economic development planning, Beard said.

“What sold Precor first and foremost was the availability of trained labor,” he said. “GTCC did an incredible job of selling Precor.”

“That’s one of our great assets,” he said. “(GTCC’s) role is going to be even more important and more critical moving forward.”

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com