Online car retailer Carmax is planning an auction house at 13311 Industrial Parkway in Marysville. In addition to a 7,100 square foot building, the site will have a sale staging area large enough for nearly 800 vehicles.
(Photo submitted)
—
Online used car retailer CarMax is planning to build in Marysville.
The city’s Design Review Board recently approved a plan to build an action house and staging area at 13311 Industrial Parkway, the former Rockwell facility.
According to plans submitted to the city, the company intends to have a 7,100-square-foot building and a lot for “sale staging” that will accommodate nearly 800 cars.
“When you hear the word CarMax, and there are many of them throughout the United States, you are thinking automatically retail,” Council President Henk Berbee said. He explained the proposed Marysville operation will be “wholesale only.”
Officials said CarMax is expected to hire 19 employees.
City Planner Ashley Gaver said CarMax will hold a lot of online auctions and there would likely be “weekly auctions” held at the site.
“They purchase a lot of cars through the internet, they trade in a lot of vehicles,” Berbee said. “So what they will do is, all those vehicles from central Ohio would end up out here.”
He said CarMax has “a number of ways they would be able to check the vehicles and see if they can go back out into the CarMax retail or if they are actually going to go through their auction system.”
Council member Donald Boerger asked if the company had said how many cars they intend to store onsite.
Gaver said they hadn’t. She said the “fairly large” staging area will be fenced off. The plan calls for a six-foot high privacy fence.
Boerger said there were concerns about “environmental impacts of that area.” He asked Gaver if she felt those concerns had been addressed. She said they had, noting that one of the conditions for approval was to add trees and buffering on the site.
Gaver said the site is in the Manufacturing Innovation district, a zoning appropriate for the auction house.
Berbee said that the facility would be on the southeast side of what he called “the old Rockwell Plant,” adding that it has “been idle for a long time.” He said the site had a quarter-mile trial track.
“All in all, when we are looking at the site, when they take out the old track, if you will, and then clean it all up, it would be an ideal situation for a business like that because it is not retail driven, it is wholesale and there is minimal traffic. I think it will be a good location for that facility.”
Berbee said a traffic study indicated the site would generate one truck with several cars an hour.
City Engineer Kyle Hoyng said CarMax has not presented any final site plans. He said that is the next step. Once those plans are submitted, Hoyng said, it would likely be four to six weeks before the company receives final approval to begin construction. After that, “it would depend on how quickly they want to