The sale of a General Electric property, known for decades where the once-mighty American conglomerate trained top managers, comes as views of long-term careers with a single company have changed. That’s led to other large learning resort-style campuses being put on the market with new uses in mind.
GE’s Crotonville executive training center, located at 1 Old Albany Post Road overlooking the Hudson River and about 40 miles outside midtown Manhattan in the New York suburb of Ossining, was sold in March for $22 million after 493 days on the market, according to CoStar data. A group made up of real estate investors and family offices bought the property, according to the Wall Street Journal, which earlier reported the transaction.
GE, spanning the fields of aerospace, energy and healthcare and long known for its headquarters in New York before its move to Connecticut and more recently Boston, this month completed a plan to separate into three distinct businesses all based in different cities. GE in April officially spun off its wind turbine and power division, known as GE Vernova, as well as GE Aerospace, following the separation of its GE HealthCare unit last year.
GE Vernova is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while GE Aerospace calls home Evendale, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb. GE HealthCare’s main office is in Chicago.
The original company, founded by famed inventor Thomas Edison in 1892 and at times having the highest stock market value, said in 2021 it would break itself apart after years of underperforming stock and shareholder disapproval, according to media reports. GE was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018 after more than a century in the U.S. stock index whose members act as a barometer of the economy.
GE Aerospace didn't respond to a CoStar News email seeking comment.
The decision to sell the Crotonville training campus, featuring a helipad and about 250 guest rooms on top of different conference venues, came as a result of the spin-offs. The company's other property needs have also shifted: GE in 2022 said it would vacate its $200 million headquarters, redeveloped from a former candy factory, at 5 Necco St. in Boston, just over three years after it moved in.
Executive Training
The Crotonville complex opened in 1956 as part of GE’s move to make itself the “best-managed company” in the world, according to an internal company post from 2017. Its advanced managers’ course at one point ran for 12 weeks to coach “old-school bosses on how to lead for such aims as scaling up manufacturing processes,” the post said, adding that decades later GE included training for those outside of its internal circle.
For instance, twice a year, GE would gather around 300 customers for its Global Customer Summit for five days of “intensive learning and immersive networking,” the post said. A manager for Australian airline Qantas once described the gatherings as looking like “the United Nations” with representations from GE’s customer base from different countries, according to the post. Another executive for a different customer appreciated having “really high-caliber input into my brain.”
“Few places in the business world were as iconic as GE’s learning center,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a director of human resources at the school, wrote in a 2022 column for Human Resource Executive magazine after GE announced its decision to sell the campus. “It was as much a symbol of a way to run corporations as it was a location. … Before MBA business schools had their luster, the Crotonville center offered that model.”
Under the late former Chief Executive Jack Welch, GE focused especially hard on developing leadership skills, with many of the training sessions conducted in mini Roman Colosseum-lookalike classrooms known as “pits,” Cappelli wrote, adding GE had a $1 billion budget at its peak on learning and development. Other companies, such as IBM, followed with their own executive learning centers, he said.
Closings of corporate training centers signal “the decline of lifetime careers,” he said, where it’s become difficult for companies to make investments in leadership development pay.
“Don’t for a moment think we are backing away from investments in the team, but there are a whole host of ways to deliver that content,” Larry Culp, chief executive of GE Aerospace, told the Wall Street Journal in March, adding a big campus doesn’t make sense for the newly broken-apart company. “It’s beautiful, you would go there on vacation. It’s a great gathering spot, a great cultural melting pot. But it is one of those things that each of the three businesses will carry on in their own way.”
The former GE is not the only company with plans to unload a large training resort campus. 3M CEO Mike Roman said in the first quarter last year that it’s “exiting” its Wonewok lakefront conference center in Park Rapids, Minnesota, as part of cost-cutting measures. The nearly 58,300-square-foot wood-framed lodge and meeting hall that sits on a 618-acre lot has been on the market for 74 days, according to CoStar data.
Boeing is selling its learning campus in Florissant, Missouri. A marketing brochure describes the property as a “world class mixed-use facility” spanning about 301,192 square feet on 284 acres and overlooks the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
“The model of companies owning and running their own purpose-built training campuses is being replaced by a more flexible model where facilities can be utilized and curated for an array of teams on an as-needed or per-event basis,” Pyramid Global Hospitality, manager of the former GE property now renamed the Crotonville Conference Center, told CoStar News in an emailed statement. “The conversion of Crotonville to this multi-user model is a big step towards that trend.”
Pyramid, manager of other properties such as Black Rock Mountain Resort in Utah, Wayfinder Waikiki in Hawaii and Marriott San Antonio Northwest in Texas, told CoStar News the Crotonville center has been booking group and conference businesses from Fortune 500 companies and universities.