Photo by Kyle Vertin
CONNOR HOFFMAN
Staff Writer
What are the strangest items a person can purchase on eBay? It turns out a university building may be near the top of that list.
A 10 modular unit office building on the Fredonia campus was sold for $50,000 by the New York State Office of General Services in November to American Demolition and Nuclear Decommissioning Inc., according to Kevin Cloos, the director of Facility Services.
This office building was sold on eBay through an account called the “New York Store,” which has surplus equipment from any state agency. Normally this account features small items like chairs and desks. But it is not uncommon to have items that are more out of the ordinary, like an office building. This website is run by the New York State Office of General Services.
Cloos said that the reason the building was sold was simply because the university did not have use for it anymore. He also said that the university asked the other SUNYs if they needed the buildings before they decided to sell it on the website.
The buildings were mostly used for office space when the university needed temporary accommodations.
“Back in 2009 when Maytum Hall was undergoing a major mechanical upgrade, we had rented these office trailers to house everyone from Maytum,” said Cloos. “The idea was never to keep them permanently.”
He said that the university started to look at the budget, and it discovered that these buildings were costing a large amount, especially the utilities that they require. These buildings operated completely with electric energy for the heat and the air conditioning, and it’s much more efficient and cheaper to use gas. And after realizing the function of the buildings could be transferred somewhere else on campus, getting rid of them was a clear choice.
Most of the people that had offices in these buildings moved out during the summer, and, once the buildings were vacant, the decision was made to sell them through the Office of General Services.
The Office of General Services does a wide range of things for the people of New York other than maintaining the website. They include operating buildings, managing construction, establishing procurement contracts and many other services.
All of the offices that were held in these buildings have been moved to either Maytum Hall, Hendrix Hall or LoGrasso Hall.
It’s up to the buyer to figure out a way to come pick up the buildings, according to Cloos.
“Once they’re sold, it’s up to the contractor that purchased them to dissemble the trailers. Make the trailers ready to be hauled down the street,” said Cloos. “They separated them, packaged them up with shrinkwrap, and made sure the tires were all ready to go, and there were brake lights on them. Once we sold them, it was their project to get them road ready and haul them off campus.”
When told how the building was sold, most students were pretty surprised to learn that it was sold using eBay.
“It does seem a little odd. It seems something that would be done at a personal level,” said Korrin Harvey, a junior international studies major. “It just doesn’t seem like something that a university would do. I feel like the university there should be, or I would assume there is, a more standard procedure than going to eBay.”
If students keep a close eye on eBay or other online services, they too might one day have the chance to buy a building from Fredonia.