"Data park" site for sale

Thursday 02 May 2019

A 14.67 acre site, which used to belong to the Long Port Group and was earmarked for industrial development as a data park, is now up for sale by way of sealed bid, after lying dormant for many years.

Bids are being accepted until noon on Friday and while none have yet been lodged with Watts & Co the handling agents expects to receive "a number" of bids on the day.

There is no reserve on the site, with the administrators, Deloitte, previously saying they'd struggled to find a buyer because of the size of it. The land was subject to a draft development framework in 2009 which was approved, and was later listed as a Key Industrial Area under the Island Development Plan (2016). 

"We're in discussions with various parties," said Wing Lai Head of Agency & Valuation for Watts & Co. 

"Generally speaking we don't receive bids until the deadline. We're expecting a number of bids, we've had communication and there has been instructions, some people would have agents involved. 

"This is probably one of the largest land sales we've done, they are really quite rare. It's 14.76 acres, they don't come about that often. There isn't a reserve but we're not obliged to accept an offer, it's up to the administrators," he said.

Pictured: Potential layout from the brochure. 

The brochure for the sale describes how the site has been cleared for use.

"The Subject Property is an industrial development site of approximately 14.67 acres. It has been cleared and works have been undertaken to discharge the planning conditions to allow the development to commence. Such works include the removal of built structures, the clearance of asbestos, the decommissioning and removal of below ground storage, waste oil and oil tanks and the creation of the main access road onto Route Militaire.

"Within Key Industrial Areas, proposals for change of use from storage and distribution to industrial uses and vice versa will be supported."

There also remains two inactive traffic lights at the entrance to the site which were installed around ten years ago.  

Pictured: Potential layout from the brochure. 

Several Long Port Group companies went into administration in 2016 including Guernsey Data Park Limited. Previously, in 2011 a manager from Long Port Group, Mark Ogier, had said that development would start the following year. 

"[The development] will be a number of data centres, so the Data Park is a group of buildings. They are effectively buildings that house computer servers... a large amount of computing power that run all the things that we don't think about.

"Generally social networking, the banks and Google - all of that is run from places like this," he said at the time. 

Pictured top: The site which is for sale by sealed bids.