PARIS – KBS Building Systems has purchased the former Waterford Homes property from a Massachusetts firm.

The Waterford Homes property has sat vacant for the last year.

“We purchased it. We closed on Friday,” Ray Atkisson, general manager of KBS confirmed Monday of the 17-acre property with a 30,000-square-foot manufacturing plant at 947 Waterford Road, which is Route 37.

The move will mean an increase in manufacturing production for the Route 26 company by as much as one third and the hiring of some 20 new employees, he said. The new site, the second manufacturing plant for the 4-year-old company, will open Jan. 2.

Some employees have already been hired and are being trained now at the Paris facility, Atkisson said.

While details of the transaction are sketchy, Atkisson said the deal was made Friday between KBS officials and Richard McCourt, who is owner of McCourt Construction of South Boston.

McCourt and his family have been well-known figures in the Massachusetts construction business for more than a century, working on various projects including the recent reconstruction of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston for MASSHighway, which they completed last week, and work on the massive Big Dig tunnel project.

Waterford Town Clerk Brenda Bigonski said she is still awaiting paperwork on the transaction, but on Friday she received documents that showed Modular Properties LLC, a limited liability company in Massachusetts, sold the property to KBS for an unknown price. Modular Properties purchased the property late in 2006 after the owners of Waterford Homes, a 2-year-old high end manufacturing business, defaulted on mortgage and loan payments.

Virginia McCourt, who is listed as a contact for the limited liability company, is also treasurer of McCourt Construction in Boston, according to the Massachusetts Secretary of State corporate divisions records. The limited liability company has not been filed in Massachusetts but was filed with the Maine Secretary of State’s corporate division in September of 2006, just two months before it purchased the Waterford Homes property.

A Portland attorney, Robert J. Keach, is listed as the company’s registered agent. He also was the attorney who handled the foreclosure of Waterford Homes in 2006. Neither the McCourts nor Keach returned calls from the Sun Journal on Monday.

Edward Keiser Jr. of Paris and a silent partner developed the Waterford Homes business in 2004 after buying the former Sanborn Machine property for $650,000.

Keiser had formed KBS Building Systems in Paris in 2003 but was quickly ousted as its chief executive officer. He sued KBS officials, but the case was dismissed in Oxford Superior Court in December 2003 after the parties settled out of court.

Bigonski said all taxes, a total of $8,400, were paid on the property on Friday, but it will be a month before the final paperwork, including the sale price, is filed with her office.

The latest deal for KBS Building Systems falls on the heels of a $5.5 million deal it penned with Great Ridge Development in July to build the Village at 30 Pines, a 90-unit condominium complex in Concord, N.H.

KBS officials say the company has grown in three years from $9 million to a $23 million business by shifting its work from traditional residential home building to more commercial-based projects, including apartment complexes on Block Island in Rhode Island and throughout New England.

Atkisson said 25 percent of KBS’s annual business is light commercial and because of the move to commercial businesses, KBS has been able to keep its employees employed through the winter for the past three years.

Copy the Story Link