FORT WAYNE – Navistar International Corp. is relocating, but that’s not a signal a slew of “For Sale” signs will sprout across Fort Wayne, housing officials say.
The maker of commercial and military trucks confirmed Wednesday it will cut ties to northeast Indiana by announcing it will consolidate some operations in Lisle, Ill., and the suburban Chicago area. The company’s Fort Wayne workforce includes 1,400, many of them engineers.
Engineering is a growing field, with an average starting salary of $58,970 by some estimates. Based on those figures, it’s not hard to understand why city officials and boosters – most notably Mayor Tom Henry – pushed hard to keep Navistar.
Even so, local housing leaders refuse to predict the worst.
“I’m not expecting a mass exodus,” said Jim Torres, president of the Fort Wayne Area Association of Realtors. “I don’t believe that at all.
“It will take a few years as Navistar makes its transition, and in that time, people could find new jobs, some could retire and things like that. A lot can happen between now and then.”
Real estate agent Ed McCutcheon agrees, although he isn’t minimizing Navistar’s impact on the housing market.
But McCutcheon said Fort Wayne endured worse in 1983 when the same company, then known as International Harvester Co., uprooted for Ohio, eventually taking with it 10,000 workers.
“This isn’t our first time to the dance,” said McCutcheon, of Century 21 Bradley. “We have a lot of things in place to (absorb) the loss of those positions. We are becoming a medical hub; there’s the colleges and GM.”
The decision by General Motors Co. to transfer 900 workers to Fort Wayne this year shows that the automaker sees the area’s truck assembly plant as vital, he said.
Obviously, “the infrastructure at the plant is in place to expand there,” he said.
GM employs about 3,400 at the Fort Wayne Assembly Plant, its largest workforce. The additional jobs are the result of plant closures nationwide by the company, which went through bankruptcy. Many transferred workers are renting residences, but some intend to buy homes, local agents say.
Through the first seven months of the year, local real estate agents reported 3,847 houses were sold, a 12 percent increase from the same period in 2009. The group will release August figures within a week.
Rudy Koch is president of the Indiana Association of Realtors. He also runs Prodigy Realtors in Fort Wayne. Koch said agents “are disappointed, but not devastated,” by Navistar’s plan to consolidate in the suburban Chicago area, even though some workers may relocate.
“Will Navistar have an impact on the housing market? Absolutely,” he said. “But this transition will take place over the next two or three years.”
McCutcheon wonders whether remnants of Navistar will remain. For the past week, he has stayed in contact with a Navistar engineer who is hunting for a rental house.
“I thought that was kind of odd since they are supposed to be pulling out,” McCutcheon said. “I asked him about it, and he doesn’t know anything, either.”
The real estate agent was unsure where the worker was moving from or for how long.
“It sounded like he didn’t want to buy a house until he knew what was going to happen,” McCutcheon said.
Jay Shipley, president of the Home Builders Association of Fort Wayne, hopes some Navistar employees have grown attached to the Summit City.
“The fact they’re not leaving right away could result in different scenarios,” he said. “You might have people who don’t want to leave Fort Wayne.”
