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Nela Park Building 1025 623cbb892821c

GE's Historic Nela Park Campus Sold to Commercial Real Estate Firm

March 24, 2022
Nela Park is best known as the location of GE’s widely respected lighting education facilities, and hundreds of lighting salespeople took classes at the historic facility.

The lighting industry has been buzzing this month with the news that Savant, the owner of GE Lighting’s iconic Nela Park facility in Cleveland, has sold the facility to an affiliate of Phoenix Investors, a national private commercial real estate firm headquartered in Milwaukee.

GE Lighting, the residential piece of the legacy GE lighting unit, was acquired by Savant Systems, a player in the professional smart home industry, in July 2020. According to the Phoenix Investors press release announcing the sale, GE Lighting plans to maintain partial tenancy at Nela Park after the acquisition.

Built in 1913, the park spans over 138 acres and houses industrial space, office space and amenities such as a cafeteria, fitness center and outdoor recreation facilities, according to the press release. In the electrical wholesaling industry, it’s best known as the location of GE’s widely respected lighting education facilities, and hundreds of lighting salespeople took classes at the historic facility.

It’s interesting to note that GE Current, the commercial lighting unit that its GE corporate parent sold in 2019 to American Business Partners and is now a Daintree company, recently opened up a lighting education center in Hendersonville, NC. GE Current announced plans in Aug. 21 to move its offices and approximately 120 employees from the Nela Park campus to nearby Beachwood, OH, according to a report at www.news5cleveland.com.

Phoenix has made other high-profile investments in iconic commercial real estate, and in Sept. 2021, it acquired the Huron Campus in Endicott, NY, the birthplace of IBM. “This is great news for our business and the future of Nela Park, as well as East Cleveland and other surrounding cities,” said Kathy Sterio, the new president of GE Lighting, in the press release. “Phoenix has a track record of success reinvigorating and investing in commercial real estate to attract new tenants and will bring that same approach to historic Nela Park. The future of Nela will be in good hands and positioned to benefit local communities that rely on job creation, income tax dollars and consumer spending to thrive.”

According to a recent report posted at inside.lighting, Sterio, a GE Lighting veteran with more than 29 years of lighting and home automation experience, was recently named president of GE Lighting after serving as the company’s chief marketing officer.

In other news at GE Lighting, the company announced that it was closing its Bucyrus, OH, light bulb plant and its Logan, OH, glass plant.