photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

The Heritage Tractor John Deere dealership on E. 23rd Street in Lawrence is pictured on June 23, 2025.

News and notes from around town:

• There will be less green and more speedometers that extend beyond 30 miles per hour at Lawrence’s former John Deere dealership. The site along East 23rd Street is set to become the new home for Lawrence’s Nissan dealership.

Dream Nissan plans to move its dealership to the site at 1110 E. 23rd Street before the end of the year. As we reported in June, Baldwin City-based Heritage Tractor closed the John Deere dealership as the Lawrence site became less convenient for area farmers. That ended a decades long run of the site serving as a tractor and farm implement dealership.

But what remained was a large building with multiple service bays. As an added bonus, the building is pretty new, having been constructed after a 2018 fire destroyed the previous John Deere dealership building. That building, combined with the large vehicle lot that surrounds it, made it a prime site for an auto dealership, Chin Rajapaksha, an owner an operator of Dream Nissan told me.

“It has worked out really, really well for us,” Rajapaksha said, estimating that building a brand new dealership location would have been at least twice as expensive.

photo by: Douglas County GIS/Journal-World

The green star marks the location of the former Heritage John Deere dealership on E. 23rd Street in Lawrence.

Dream Nissan has been on the hunt for a new home ever since moving from the Lawrence Auto Plaza development on south Iowa Street earlier this year. Rajapaksha said the dealership wasn’t happy with its visibility off of Iowa Street with that particular location. It moved the dealership to an auxiliary building on the dealership lot of its sister company, Lawrence Kia, 1225 E. 23rd Street.

That location, however, was always meant to be temporary. When Heritage Tractor closed the John Deere dealership this summer, the wheels to get Nissan into the location began turning pretty quickly.

Rajapaksha hopes to have Dream Nissan operating out of the new location by Thanksgiving, however, expect some construction to be going on around those operations. Rajapaksha plans to do a significant remodel of the building to give it the look and feel of a modern Nissan dealership.

The new location also will open the door for a new business to open at another 23rd Street site owned by the dealership. Currently, Dream Nissan’s service department is located at 1226 E. 23rd Street, which is the former home of the ATSI transmission shop. In the coming months, the Nissan service shop will move to the former John Deere dealership site, and Rajapaksha and his partners plan to open a new quick service auto business. The location will be open to the general public for oil changes and other quick auto maintenance tasks.

There also will be room for another business to locate in the spot that Dream Nissan currently occupies at Lawrence Kia complex. Rajapaksha said Lawrence Kia may expand into that spot, or the company may use the building to house its Lawrence Mitsubishi dealership.

The new deal does solidify the idea of 23rd Street becoming a corridor for car sales. South Iowa Street has long been the place where most car dealers have congregated in the city, but 23rd Street will now have three major dealerships — Kia, Nissan and Ford, which is near 23rd and Alabama streets. It will be interesting to see if that idea takes hold in an even larger way in the future.

There is one other large building on 23rd Street that conceivably could get some interest from a car dealership. The former Dillons grocery store building at 23rd and Naismith — right next door to the Ford dealership — is now vacant after Dillons opened its new store along Iowa Street.

If anything, that building might be too big for a dealership, but you could park a lot of vehicles inside the space, and also have a very large parking lot to display vehicles. I have no insight to what deals may be discussed for the former Dillons site, but I would guess it is on the list of possibilities. The biggest obstacle might be whether there are other dealers looking to come to the Lawrence market. Most of the major brands have a presence here, although not all, and there is always the possibility of a large, used auto chain operation.

•••

Rajapaksha’s Lawrence Kia dealership and Dream Nissan have been in the news recently for mysterious reasons. We reported last month that federal and state agencies served a search warrant at Lawrence Kia as part of an investigation involving conspiracy and theft.

The investigation came to light when the Kansas Highway Patrol blocked off access to the dealership for several hours on Sept. 4. The Kansas Department of Revenue provided a brief statement that said: “The Kansas Department of Revenue Office of Special Investigations is leading a joint investigation with Kansas Office of the State Bank Commissioner, Kansas Attorney General’s Office, Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and United States Secret Service (USSS) on allegations of Conspiracy, Theft and Making False Information concerning Lawrence Kia, Dream Automotive and Dream Nissan in Lawrence.”

When I interviewed Rajapaksha this week, he said the Kansas Department of Revenue had recently returned a small number of the documents it had taken as part of the search warrant. However, he said the department didn’t provide any more details about the investigation or it status. Rajapaksha has said he and other executives of the dealership don’t know what has led to the investigation.

I also asked a spokesman with the Department of Revenue for an update, but he said no new details were available.

“The matter is still under investigation and no further information can be shared at this time,” an email from the department said.

•••

While we are on the subject of vehicles, I’ll note a Kansas City area auto repair business has expanded into Lawrence. The small, family-owned chain of repair shops called Auto Doctors has moved into the spot previously occupied by Gateway Auto Service. That location is just east of Sixth and Kasold at 534 Gateway Drive.

According to its website, the company has been operating in Overland Park since 2001, and has also expanded into Gardner. It looks like the shop is a full-service auto repair location with ASE certified mechanics.