BUFFALO, N.Y. -- SolarCity's stocks have been volatile for more than a year, but even by its own standards, September was a rough month. Shares bottomed out at less than $17 before bouncing back a little bit toward the end of the month.

"You have a group of people who are saying, 'I own this stock. I'm just going to be patient. I'm going to forget about it for five years' and then you have a big amount of sellers just saying, 'look it, there's too much uncertainty. I'm just going to step away from it,'" Mike Lomas, president of The Financial Guys, said.

A deal has been in the works for Tesla Motors to buy the solar technology company since June, but now into October, the companies have not finalized a merger.

"The timeline doesn't bother me as much as that (Tesla CEO and SolarCity chairman) Elon Musk doesn't seem to have control of his board," SUNY Buffalo State College economist Fred Floss said.

SolarCity, meanwhile, is being sued by another company for intellectual property theft. Despite all this, the company says it plans to move employees already in Western New York to its new facility in Buffalo later in October. A spokesperson said the company plans to begin hiring by the beginning of 2017 and producing solar panels by the summer.

"If you're asking me probabilities, I would say 50-50. There's a 50 percent shot that that makes it through," Lomas said.

Floss gave the company a more optimistic, at 75 percent, chance of permanently moving into the RiverBend facility, but believes the state should be looking at other prospective tenants for the $750 million complex, just in case.

"Hopefully, they're already out looking for a plan B and a plan C but they should've been doing that with or without any of this news that we've heard in the last couple of weeks with SolarCity," he said.

Lomas does believe there's a good chance another company would be willing to move in if SolarCity doesn't work out.

"I'm hoping, as a taxpayer in New York state, that because the new infrastructure is new and it's all the latest technology, that somebody else in some other industry might step up and occupy it," he said.

That could mean a new incentive package, on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars the state's already spent. Floss acknowledged that might be hard for taxpayers to stomach.

"If we're too negative, we could end up with an empty building so we have to be careful about not pushing back too hard. We want a good deal but we don't want an empty building," Floss said.