BRUNSWICK — Developer George Schott expects to place the first batch of former military housing units along McKeen Street up for sale by this spring.

In October 2010, Schott bought approximately 700 former military housing units in Brunswick and Topsham from Northeast Housing, a collaboration between the Navy and Balfour-Beatty, a British firm. Because of a deal signed by the Navy with GMH Housing, which sold the contract to Balfour-Beatty, the Navy retained ownership of the land beneath the residences. The Navy conveyed that to the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority ( MRRA) as part of the Brunswick Naval Air Station closure process.

In November 2011, Schott’s Affordable Midcoast Housing LLC (AMH) and MRRA offi- cials announced that they had forged a deal to sell the land to Schott, which would make it possible for him to begin selling residential properties.

MRRA executive director Steve Levesque told The Times Record on Thursday that he expects the $3.35 million deal to close by the end of the month.

When the sale is completed, Schott plans to put 19 homes along McKeen Street on the market by April or May. That would double the current housing inventory in that price range, according to Mike Baribeau, past president of the Merrymeeting Realtors Association.

Currently, Baribeau said, there are 15 Brunswick houses for sale in the $80,000 to $150,000 range and 28 in that range in Brunswick and Topsham combined.

A November memo from AMH representative Scott Howard indicates the price range of the McKeen Street homes would be between $100,000 and $140,000.

In total, Schott owns 231 houses in the McKeen Street neighborhood, which are a part of the 646 former Navy housing units he now owns in Brunswick and Topsham.

Not all of those units are set to go to market — 110 units are occupied by the Navy’s Supervisor of Shipbuilding program at Bath Iron Works and 12 units are to be sold back to MRRA — but the eventual sale of the remaining 526 units will have an impact locally, Baribeau said.

“It’s going to happen sooner or later, and unfortunately it’s happening when the real estate market is in a hole already,” Baribeau said. “It’s just going to prolong the downturn in the local real estate market.”

Adding the 19 McKeen Street units to the local market this spring will put the equivalent of nearly a year’s worth of inventory on the market, Baribeau said.

However, Baribeau said Schott’s plan to sell the houses in phases showed attention to that impact.

“We have to get rid of that inventory at some point,” Baribeau said. “It’s better to do it incrementally than to put them on the market at the same time and, in a way, (Schott) is sensitive to that.”

The plan

The 19 homes, which face McKeen Street, will be the first to sell because “those are already accessed by a public road, a public sewer and public water,” Schott said.

When military families occupied the residences, Northeast Housing maintained utility service for all of the units. Separate service accounts must be created for the residences before they could be sold for civilian use.

Schott said he will work through the summer to upgrade the utility and road infrastructure for the interior neighborhoods of the McKeen Street development, with the hope that the town will take over maintenance of those roads in the fall of 2012 or spring of 2013.

Howard’s November memo listed the estimated cost of those upgrades at $2 million.

Until homes within the development gain access to public utilities and public roads, Schott said, he does not plan to put any more units on the market.

In a housing disposition plan drafted by AMH in November, Howard outlined plans for selling houses at all of the former Navy developments, including houses at: McKeen Street, Mariner Landing, Midway Terrace, Brunswick Gardens, Woodland Village and Station Quarters.

Howard wrote in that outline that the McKeen Street houses would be sold in phases of 40 units over a period of five to six years, depending on the housing demand.

Homes in the Mariner Landing, Midway Terrace, Brunswick Gardens, Woodland Village and Station Quarters neighborhoods could begin being sold sometime in 2014 or 2015, according to Howard’s outline.

Following the MRRA board’s approval of the sale in November, Levesque said that the terms of that housing disposition plan would be governed by deed covenants on each parcel Schott would acquire in the sale.

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