XENIA — The former Greene County Career Center equestrian facility and surrounding farmland, located at 551 Brush Row Road in Xenia Township, sold at auction Thursday for $1 million.
The buyer, who was represented at the auction by a third party, is Brush Row Farm, LLC. The buyer’s representative declined to comment. Similar to the old main campus, the sale contract must be approved by the board of education at its June 9 meeting prior to closing on the sale.
Sheridans, LLC, which also presided over the auction of the former main Greene County Career Center building, offered the auction both online and in-person.
The property is currently an agricultural zoning, and boasts 50 acres of land, 28 horse stalls, classrooms, and both indoor and outdoor riding arenas. It includes a total of 28,000 indoor square footage, and 36 tillable acres.
“Everything was professionally built,” Matt Sheridan said of the facility. “Everything was done to the highest degree.”
The indoor riding arena is a highlight of the property, for riding purposes, as well as the prospect of space for additional stalls, Sheridan added.
“Those are the things that people were looking at,” he said. “Just the flexibility of the facility.”
Per Ohio law, the property was offered to other area public and private schools before being put up for public auction. Since the facility was being used for educational purposes, the new owner of the building is not required to pay property taxes until 2023.
Once the sale is finalized, the money will go back into the career center’s permanent improvement fund, and will most likely go toward reducing debt on the new GCCC facility, according to Superintendent Dave Deskins.
The sale of the equestrian center is “bittersweet” for GCCC officials, as the equine science program at the school will be discontinued with the sale of the property this year. The board of education decided to disinvest in the program last year for multiple reasons, including the cost of keeping up a facility and relatively low enrollment numbers. The 2021 senior class is the last group of equine science students to graduate from GCCC.
“We know it brings joy and it’s affected a lot of kids in the years the school has owned it,” Deskins said of the facility. “At the same time, it’s an exciting time for the career center because at our new campus we have so many additional programs we’ve started, coupled with the programs we’ve always been known for.”
The veterinary science program, which also used the equine facilities, will continue operating at the new GCCC main campus at 532 Innovation Way in Xenia.
Students began taking classes at the career center’s $70 million facility on Aug. 25, 2020. The new facility is 264,000 square feet, and includes state-of-the art learning space for its approximately 730 students.
