Our local housing market has been looking for a spark. Don’t get me wrong, we are doing much better than most areas in the country, but we have been looking for a spark for a few years. This is it! Conoco-Phillips the oil company is developing a renewable energy research center on the former Storage Tek campus in Louisville. They will begin to redevelop the site later this year. The company plans to redevelop the site with a state-of-the-art research facility as well as a hotel. The site will be their world headquarters for renewable energy research and last week they announced that the site could employ up to 7,000 people. These would be high paying research jobs. The impact on the area could be simply amazing. Operations won’t begin until 2011 or 2012 but the impact on the area from construction will begin much sooner.

You might remember that the company purchased the site anonymously and at market value.

The company has already signed a multi-million dollar sponsored research agreement with the University of Colorado Bio-fuels center.

Not since IBM came to Boulder in the early 1970’s and Level 3 and Sun Microsystems came to Broomfield in the late 1990’s, have we seen such a large corporate promise of jobs. This is a great time to invest in the area. Even without this future influx I feel a pent up demand that is just waiting for some good news to pop.