CHCH Television's headquarters — including the historic mansion built in 1850 that has been home to the station for more than six decades — is up for sale. But company executives say it will be "several years" before the station moves.

The site also includes studios and offices.

"We're starting to look for a new, more modern and more size-appropriate home for CHCH," Chris Fuoco, vice president for Channel Zero, CHCH's parent company told CBC Hamilton in an email.

Fuoco called the move "routine space planning" and said the company told employees earlier this year.

Later, Fuoco shared an email that Channel Zero sent employees that said "it will still be several years before we have our new home and need to start planning the move."

A peek inside the buildings

A commercial realtor in Burlington has posted a gallery of photographs of the inside and outside of the building, located at 163 Jackson Street West.

The realtor did not immediately respond Monday morning to an interview request, and there is no price listed on the gallery.

The Hamilton station abruptly cut 129 unionized full-time and 38 part-time employees in December. It also went from 80 to 17.5 hours of local news programming per week.

Employees downsized said they received no severance at the time. That included long-time reporters and on-air personalities, including Matt Hayes, Scot Urquhart, Donna Skelly and Mark Hebscher.

'Rare surviving example'

The building was named Pinehurst when it was built around 1850 for a Hamilton businessman named Tristram Bickle, according to a city report written when heritage staff recommended designating the property as historic.

The building has housed prominent Hamilton personalities and institutions nearly ever since. The publisher of the Hamilton Spectator, William Southam, bought the property in 1877 for $11,500, from its previous owner Bishop Thomas Brock Fuller, who was the first bishop of the Diocese of Niagara.

A radio station moved in after the Second World War and CHCH took over the property in 1953.

City heritage staff assessed the mansion's architectural value as a "rare surviving example of pre-Confederation stone construction" and considered it, with another property nearby, a "significant grouping of mid-nineteenth century building construction in an area that has experienced considerable change."