General Electric Co. didn’t need to go far to find a buyer for the nearly 67-acre Fairfield campus that served as its headquarters since 1974. In fact, the company didn’t need to leave the neighborhood.
GE has inked a deal with Sacred Heart University, located across Route 59 in Fairfield, to sell the property for $31.5 million. The site includes two office buildings totaling about 500,000 square feet, 800 parking spaces, a 28-room hotel, and a helicopter landing pad. Sacred Heart is expected to complete its purchase by the end of the year.
The company put the property on the market after deciding in January that it would relocate its corporate office to Boston. At the time, 800 people worked at the headquarters.
About 150 GE employees made the move to a temporary office in Boston’s Fort Point section over the summer. Most of the others transferred to an office in Norwalk, through a series of moves that wrapped up in October.
GE spokeswoman Susan Bishop said more than 25 interested buyers toured the campus after it was put on the market in June. The company didn’t set a sale price.
“We just wanted to see what the market would accept, knowing it was a very unique ... type of property,” Bishop said. “We’re quite pleased with both the price and the speed in which it sold.”
In a statement, Sacred Heart officials said they planned to use the property as “an innovation campus,” to expand its computing school and to develop programs in science- and math-oriented fields.
The university has longstanding ties with GE; its business college is named after former CEO Jack Welch. Elements of the business school will move to the former GE campus, including its hospitality management program. The university will also move its college of education, art and design program, and its business office to the site.
Kleban Properties, a real estate developer and manager based in Fairfield, had publicly discussed working with Fairfield University to make a bid for the GE property. A spokeswoman for Kleban declined to comment on Monday, citing the terms of a non-disclosure agreement.
Meanwhile, GE is moving ahead with plans for a $200 million headquarters project in Fort Point, a few blocks away from its temporary offices. GE will acquire land from Procter & Gamble’s Gillette campus, a deal that’s expected to close by the end of the year. The 2.4-acre campus will include two older brick buildings that will be renovated for GE’s use and owned by state agency MassDevelopment, as well as a new 12-story structure that will be owned by GE. Together, the three buildings will total about 390,000 square feet.
The Baker administration has promised to contribute as much as $125 million in state grant funds to the acquisition and development of the GE campus.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto.