MONEY

Dealer.com renovates old General Dynamics building

DAN D’AMBROSIO
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger (center) gets a tour of Dealer.com's new building at the former General Dynamics plant in Burlington from CEO Rick Gibbs (left) on Friday, May 2, 2014.

Dealer.com just keeps hiring — there are 100 open positions — and now the company that recently sold for nearly $1 billion has more space. The Burlington firm has room for more people to come up with more online tools to help car dealers sell more cars.

Mayor Miro Weinberger visited the latest manifestation of Dealer.com's relentless growth last week: 40,000 square feet of newly renovated space the company is leasing in the building on Lakeside Avenue where General Dynamics once designed weapons systems for the U.S. government.

General Dynamics left Burlington in October 2009 to relocate to the IBM property in Williston, taking about 450 jobs out of the city. The Burlington facility was a technology center, not a manufacturing operation.

Dealer.com software engineers began moving into the building, which cost about $3 million to renovate and furnish, in early April. The space features the same bold colors and open floor plan as Dealer.com's main facility just north on Pine Street.

The engineers will move back to the main facility once "scrum rooms" accommodating 10 to 12 people each are finished there, said President and CEO Rick Gibbs. Gibbs explained that engineering teams will gather in the rooms to develop software in a more "agile" environment. Other employees then will be moved to the new facility on Lakeside Avenue.

Dealer.com has a new building at the former General Dynamics plant in Burlington.

Sean Mulcahey, facilities manager for Dealer.com, said the new space can accommodate up to 275 employees, and the space came not a moment too soon.

"We build them, and they fill them up," Mulcahey said.

Dealer.com has about 850 employees, all but about 70 of whom work in Burlington; the company has a second office in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Gibbs said Dealer.com has another 100 open positions this year, 90 of which are in Burlington.

"We definitely needed more space," he said.

Dealer.com has been one of the perennial business success stories in Vermont since its founding in 1998. The company serves more than 7,000 car dealers in the United States, out of a total of about 18,000, building their websites and providing inventory management software that helps the dealers sell cars online.

Dealer.com also offers an advertising component that hooks dealers up with digital ads on Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and a customer-relationship management system that gives dealers a range of tools to streamline operations, from negotiating with buyers to tracking dealerships' results.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger takes a picture of Dealer.com’s new facility at the former General Dynamics plant in Burlington during a recent tour.

Last December, in one of the biggest deals ever for a Vermont business, Dealer.com sold for nearly $1 billion to Dealertrack Technologies, a publicly traded company based in Lake Success, N.Y.

There was speculation at the time that the sale might lead to Dealer.com's leaving Vermont, but Mayor Weinberger said last week that projects like the one he toured on Lakeside Avenue are reassuring where Dealer.com's future is concerned.

"To come to this facility and see this level of investment, and hear these plans, all of that is great to see," Weinberger said.

Weinberger called the new facility "concrete evidence" that Dealer.com is here to stay, which is what CEO Gibbs has said all along. The city installed six rapid flashing beacons for crosswalks along Pine Street to make it safer and easier for Dealer.com employees to walk between the company's new facility and the main facility on Pine Street. Gibbs said Dealer.com also is providing bikes for employees to use to get from one building to the other.

Dealer.com is "Exhibit A," Weinberger said, in the technology hub he hopes the southern part of the city along Pine Street will become.

"This," Weinberger said, "is the future of Burlington."

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.