Baton Rouge-based Fabricated Steel Products has purchased a roughly five-acre site at 11024 S. Choctaw Drive that was formerly occupied by Waskey Bridges for $636,000.
“We don’t have a concrete plan for the site yet,” says Fabricated Steel President Kevin Tabor. “We’re thinking about building another building there, but we haven’t made a final decision.”
Fabricated Steel already has a presence in the South Choctaw area. The company’s headquarters is located nearby at 2487 N. Flannery Road, and it also has a smaller facility at 11718 S. Choctaw Drive. The structural steel fabricator has been in business since 1986, serving industrial plants and refineries throughout the South.
“I’d been looking around for additional property for a while, and this one just kind of met all of our needs,” Tabor says, adding the company is considering moving its current operations on South Choctaw to the new location.
Houston-based Waskey Bridges largely vacated the property—which includes a total of 4.89 acres, a 10,000-square-foot building and rail servitude—a few years ago when it moved its main Baton Rouge office and plant to 2651 N. Flannery Road.
“Waskey had been using it as a backup yard, just for storage,” says Mark Hebert, who represented Waskey Bridges in the deal. “It was kind of the perfect overflow site for them, so there was no urgency for them to sell.”
Hebert says the property has been on the market for some time and had been priced as high as $750,000 at one point.
“I think both the owner and the buyer got a really good deal,” he says. “You know, in good times, it seems like everyone walks away from the table happy, and that’s what we had with this deal.”
Troy Daigle of Donnie Jarreau Commercial Real Estate represented the buyer in the deal.
—Steve Sanoski
