Lancair’s facility in Redmond has been put up for sale.

But the kit-airplane company isn’t going anywhere, company officials said.

Lancair plans to stay in the building at 250 S.E. Timber Ave. near the Redmond Airport as a tenant, said Chief Operating Officer Tom Bowen. The company might even make a push to buy the building, though no proposal has yet been put forward.

Compass Commercial Real Estate Services listed the 38,375-square-foot building for sale last week, at a price of $1.72 million. It joins the former Cessna airplane factory in Bend, which has been on the market for about three years.

Lancair had been leasing its building from Lake Oswego developer Harold Cox, according to Deschutes County property records. Cox bought the building in 2006, paying $2.6 million, county records show.

But he lost it in foreclosure in June, and Southern California financial services firm Sabal Financial now holds the title.

Two out of town groups have shown interest in the building, said Gardner Williams, a principal broker with Compass Commercial.

But Bowen said that, while Lancair hasn’t formally put a bid on the building, an ownership push isn’t out of the question.

“We’ve talked to (Sabal) ourselves, and are interested in the building,” Bowen said. “We lease the building from whoever the owner is. We’re a good tenant, and that’s part of what makes this an attractive listing.”

Like much of Central Oregon’s aviation industry, Lancair’s bottom line has taken a hit since the market crash in 2008.

A huge slowdown in demand for big-ticket items like planes has completely reversed the early 2000s growth in the market.

Deschutes County had a monthly average of nearly 1,200 transportation manufacturing jobs in 2006, according to Oregon Employment Department data.

That figure has dropped 80 percent, to an average of 240 jobs, this year.

Lancair has lowered its workforce from about 70 in 2010 to about 50 today, with across-the-board cuts reducing overhead costs at the company, amid a drop-off in demand for their kit planes.

“We’ve been steadily retrenching since late 2010,” Bowen said. “We’re a market-driven business…. Private aviation is a business that’s primarily driven by high net-worth individuals. The market for multimillion-dollar airplanes isn’t robust right now because of the economy.”

But the company is still focused on finding buyers for its Evolution Turbine model kit planes, and it’s still one of the biggest players left in Central Oregon’s airplane industry, along with Epic Aircraft, which earlier this year purchased the building it had been leasing at Bend Municipal Airport.

The same can’t be said of the former occupant of another Central Oregon airplane factory, Cessna.

Bend city and economic development officials have been trying to find a buyer for the 204,000-square-foot factory on Nelson Road at Bend Municipal Airport since Cessna left in 2009.

Two years earlier, Cessna had paid $26 million to buy the former Columbia Aircraft company out of bankruptcy.

Officials have led potential buyers on tours of the facility several times since it went on the market, said Roger Lee, CEO of Economic Development for Central Oregon.

No one has bitten so far.

Collier’s International, the real estate company listing the Cessna plant, dropped its asking price to $3.9 million earlier this year, broker Jerry Matson said.

The building, still owned by Cessna but on land owned by the city of Bend, was first put on the market for $7 million. The asking price was reduced to $5.97 million in June 2010, Matson said, before being lowered again this year.

The lower price could generate new buzz for the building, though talks on the building haven’t gone farther than preliminary discussions, he said.

“We continue to get inquiries from a number of different sources,” Matson said. “People continue to tour it, both locally based and from afar.”