"I would say you could attribute it to when they signed the Wal-Mart contract" earlier this summer, said Janet Davison with the Fairbanks North Star Borough Community Research Center. "I'm thinking it's been kind of a domino effect."

She said it could be called a retail boom.

"It's going to pull a lot of the west-end traffic over to this other side," she said.

Davison's office produces a regular, e-mailed report of what she unabashedly calls "rumors" -- a sort of tip sheet listing possible business developments in the Fairbanks area. While some of the major players involved were reluctant to name names, it is clear north Fairbanks is on track to become a commercial hub for the city.

Start with the basics

Wal-Mart's decision to build a 150,000-square-foot store on 26.5 acres in north Fairbanks definitely has generated a storm of business activity in the neighborhood, said Jerry Sadler, owner of Airport Equipment Rental Inc.

Sadler said that about a year and a half ago he bought 17.5 acres from the Bentley Family Trust, a major land owner in the area. Once he subdivided the plot -- located across the Old Steese Highway from the Wal-Mart site -- it turned into hot property.

"I just signed the deal with Boston Pizza and Sports Bar," he said. "We've got a bank and a major bookstore going in. I've got a strip mall going in, there's a dentist, I've got an accountant.

"I've got about four acres left," he said. "And I don't imagine I'll have them for long. It seemed to work out just fine."

Life-long Fairbanks resident Jim Desmond, who owns Desmond Realty, brokered the deals to sell the properties owned by the Bentley Family Trust to Sadler and Wal-Mart. He said more business development is on the way in the area, including three national tenants he declined to name.

"Oh, it's just incredible, it's just hoppin'," Desmond said.

The Wal-Mart store, Fairbanks' first, is scheduled to open next year, and it has been a long time coming, Desmond said.

"I've been working with them for 12 years. It was a marathon deal," he said.

Desmond said there are "quite a few developments" being planned for Bentley Family Trust acreage in the area, but that's all he can say.

"I wish I could talk about them," Desmond said. "It would be great for marketing."

Historic real estate

The Bentley Family Trust property originally encompassed 849 acres of north Fairbanks and was worked as a dairy by the family in the early 1920s under homestead grants from the Harding and Coolidge administrations, said Cliff Burglin, one of two co-trustees for the family.

It is bordered by the Old Steese Highway to the east, the Johansen Expressway to the north and College Road on the south and west. During the past seven decades much of the property has been used at times as a military site, a junkyard, and a construction and storage site for 200 miles of pipe for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The trust and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation have been working for several years to remediate areas at the site that showed soil and groundwater contamination from chlorinated solvents and petroleum products. The ADEC states on its Web site that "the sources of the contamination appear to be associated with former operations on the property."

Burglin agrees. He said the problems identified by the ADEC are being addressed and only a small percentage of the property is involved. "It's kind of a non-issue, because city water and sewer utilities are in place," he said.

The trustees decided in 1967 to offer to annex the land to the City of Fairbanks, and since then "it has become a prime tax base for the city and the borough," Burglin said.

All the undeveloped land is assessed by the city and the borough at $3 per square foot. "It's damn high," he said. "We're paying about $375,000 a year, but that's OK, that's what its worth."

Land sales also have generated millions of dollars for beneficiaries of the trust.

When property is sold, all the proceeds are distributed to a variety of nonprofit organizations, Burglin said. They include the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, the Noel Wien Library, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of California Berkeley and the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle.

More developments ahead

Of the original 849 acres, the Bentley Family Trust has sold about 150 acres to "private parties," Burglin said. And more will likely be on the market soon.

"We're working on selling a lot more property in the next two years," he said.

Two potential clients are Lowe's Companies Inc., which operates Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse Stores, and Fred Meyer Stores Inc.

"We've been talking with them, we're talking," Burglin said.

Representatives from the two firms were equally noncommittal.

"We are certainly evaluating potential opportunities in Alaska," said Chris Ahearn, a spokesperson for Lowe's at the company's headquarters in Wilkesboro, N.C. "But we don't have any specific sites that we can discuss at this time."

Rob Boley, a spokesperson for Fred Meyer's western regional headquarters in Portland, Ore., also was vague about his company's plans.

"We are considering replacing one of the two stores we have in Fairbanks, an 81,000 square-foot store in north Fairbanks, with a larger store," Boley said. "That's something we've been looking at, but right now there are no agreements. Stay tuned."

Whatever deals are cut, Burglin is bullish in his predictions for the Fairbanks economy and for future commercial developments from sales of trust property.

"There are going to be a lot of very happy beneficiaries," he said.