Could this be the future site of Heritage Baptist?

This afternoon, one of our deacons – Greg Jones – and I went to see a piece of property I had enquired about before Christmas. It is just south of the retail district on South Willow Street. It is 5.39 acres of relatively flat, unencumbered land although there are some wetlands.

Around 2002, Thrifty Rental Car did some site plans and had planned to purchase the property and convert it into basically a huge parking lot. That plan fell through and the current tenant moved in with plans to build a 10,000 sq ft warehouse. They rented the property for the last few years but now they need to build 30,000 sq ft and have purchased property in Bow, about 20 miles north. (They never did build their building).

Currently, there is a 1936 farm house sitting on the property. The farm house was converted to offices about three years ago by the current tenant. Since they just bought their new property, they want to stay on the property for another six months or so.

There are probably 2 acres or so of wetlands, and most of it is very shallow wetlands indeed. We are fairly confident that we can get allowances from the city to create a wetlands easement in the back of the property and still have room to build a 10,000-12,000 sq ft worship space with ample parking. This would provide us space for a 200-person worship space. The Manchester ordinances require 4 parking spaces per seat, so provided another 50 auxiliary seats (classrooms, etc), we would need to have 63 parking spaces. All of this could easily be placed on the property and still leave room for plenty of green space and a playground for our children!

How much, you ask? Believe it or not, the seller is asking $275,000 for the entire property, house and garage included. By comparison a similarly sized building on 2 acres of land is currently selling for nearly $450,000 less than five miles away. In other words, this is a very useful piece of property at a very reasonable price.

Of course, there is a lot that would need to be done before this could become a reality. If we were to buy the property, we would have to work things out so that it basically costs us nothing until our lease is up and we are ready to build. This means basically renting out the office space of the farm house to cover the mortgage and taxes (since we’re not using the property as a church space yet, we would need to pay taxes on it). All of this would require some extensive legal work, but Greg seems confident that it can be done.

So, there is a lot to pray about, but this is a very real opportunity that we would be fools not to explore. Please pray with us. Could this be our new home in 2009? Who knows.