The owner of a Tipp City manufacturer recently offered Industrial Realty Group $3.5 million to buy part of Air Commerce, the former Emery/UPS building near the Dayton International Airport.

The offer expired Nov. 16 without response from IRG, according to Albert Naggar, chairman and owner of Process Equipment Co. Naggar still wants to consolidate his company’s four area facilities, but not into a newly built campus, as he originally proposed.

Naggar now wants to find a suitable existing facility. “I’d like to stay in the area, ” he said Tuesday.

Naggar said he is puzzled as to why IRG representatives did not respond to his offer, especially since a Dayton-area IRG representative first contacted PECo last summer.

“They were eager for us to rent, maybe something else, I don’t know,” Naggar said.

Chris Semarjian, owner of Industrial Commerce Ltd and IRG’s representative in Ohio, declined to comment at length, but said he is working with three companies interested in the 950,000-square-foot Air Commerce site. IRG seeks parties who are best for the building and the Dayton area, he said.

“We try to deal with people that we feel can cross the finish line,” Semarjian said. Asked to elaborate, he said, “We’ll see what (Naggar) has in store.”

Semarjian added that Air Commerce is available for lease. “I just don’t know it makes sense for the property,” he added when asked about a sale of the property or a portion of it.

Last July, Naggar first announced plans to consolidate four local facilities and nearly 200 employees into one campus on 13 acres on U.S. 40 just east of Ohio 202.

Since then, however, Naggar said he has focused on finding an existing facility. He said an IRG representative “cold-called” PECo last summer, and talks slowly began.

Naggar said that although initial discussions concerned leasing space at Air Commerce, he did offer to buy the building or part of it in a Nov. 2 phone conversation with an IRG representative.

Naggar’s offer proposed $3.5 million for 600,000 square feet of Air Commerce, including about 570,000 square feet of manufacturing space, 30,000 square feet of office space, 680 parking spaces and access to and from the acquired property. The portion of the building sold to PECo was to be physically separated, according to a Nov. 9 written offer Naggar sent to Semarjian.

Also, PECo offered to relieve IRG of half of its rent obligation to the city of Dayton for the land lease.

Naggar said Dayton government officials helped him craft the offer and were interested in seeing PECo consolidate there. Shelley Dickstein, Dayton assistant city manager, and Timothy Downs, deputy director of economic development, could not be immediately reached.

IRG owns substantial industrial property in Ohio and the Dayton area, including a former General Motors assembly plant in Moraine and a Tenneco plant in Kettering.

Dayton City Commission voted in April to release UPS from a lease agreement on the building that became Air Commerce, transferring the responsibility for $640,000 in annual lease payments to IRG through 2016.

Before that vote, UPS was responsible for the property until 2020, but city leaders believed that IRG could find new employers for the building, which has been vacant since 2005, when UPS expanded operations to Louisville.