Marketing a former nerve gas site

Here’s a challenge for a savvy brokerage.

Vermillion County in western Indiana is preparing to take over
the Newport Chemical Depot, where the Army stored nerve gas for a number of years.

About 3,500 acres of the site
is expected to be redeveloped for business in the next couple of years. Destruction of the gas was completed last year.

But with a stigma like that, who would want to locate there?

Barbara Coles, who runs a public relations
firm in Indianapolis, says the site will need to be marketed with transparency, honesty and lots of facts to overcome the
stigma. One more time: Lots of facts.

Several independent sources will need to be called in to verify the site
is safe based on verifiable tests. “You need to go in feeling very, very comfortable with the credibility and the facts,”
Coles says.

She also would price it at fair market value to remove any suspicion the site has so much as a trace
of unsafe chemicals.

How would you pitch the site? Will it be any harder to market than a house where a grisly
murder took place?