Business leader Preston Haskell has emerged as a potential buyer of the First Guaranty Trust & Savings building Downtown, but an owner’s representative said there is no formal offer on the building.
The building, commonly referred to as the “jaguar building” and Bostwick Building, has two pieces of legislation making their way through City Council that has become a hot-topic issue.
The first would label it as a historic landmark that would not allow demolition and the other is an appeal of the City’s Historic Preservation Commission denial to demolish.
Val and Karl Bostwick have filed the appeal and protested the potential designation. Karl Bostwick is an owner of the building, while Val Bostwick serves as an owner representative.
Val Bostwick told Council on Tuesday the asking price was $325,000, below what he says was the City’s appraised value of $352,000, and that the Bostwicks have no firm offer on the building.
He told Council that structural problems that would require more than $1 million in repairs and associated costs made it economically unfeasible for the owner and a buyer to undertake.
In addition, the building continues to accrue daily City fines of $100 that began in March because it is not up to code.
He reiterated early Thursday morning that the building had no formal offer and that a formal offer from a potential buyer he did not name was rejected Nov. 27.
He said the offer was rejected because it represented just the value of the land and not the building.
According to the Property Appraiser’s website, the 2012 certified assessed value of the property is $351,043 and the market value of the land is $76,500.
Haskell, founder of The Haskell Company and current chairman of the board of directors, has placed an offer that “substantially exceeds the tax appraiser’s value of the land,” he said in a Wednesday email to Council member Lori Boyer
and others.
In the email, he says the value is $20 per square foot and that a first offer also was in excess of the appraised land value.
“Yes, I am absolutely committed to preserving and restoring the building,” he said in the email. “I have no specific plans or tenants, but simply wish to see this building and its architecture preserved. It’s my little contribution to downtown development and historic preservation.”
In another email to Oliver Barakat, CBRE senior vice president and vice chair of the Downtown Investment Authority, and others, Haskell said his initial offer was between $20 and $30 per square foot, which he increased Dec. 7 to between $30 and $40 per square foot.
Haskell said he uses land area because Val Bostwick said the building must be demolished and bare land is all that he would have to sell.
In addition, Haskell says Barakat advised him the all-time high for the land in the area is $40 per square foot, which was at its peak before 2008.
Barakat said Wednesday he was serving as a facilitator for a potential deal, but would not identify the interested buyer.
According to the property appraiser, the total area of the property is 3,825 square feet. Its 2012 market land market value represents $20 per square foot in land value, according to the website.
Haskell in the email also said he saw the Bostwicks three hours before Tuesday’s Council meeting and reiterated his offer was still good — and that to testify otherwise to Council was “an outright falsehood.”
Val Bostwick said Thursday that he had an informal lunch meeting with the unidentified buyer, who discussed possibly increasing the initial offer, but that there has been no formal offer and has not been one
since November. He would not confirm the buyer was
Haskell.
The Council Land Use and Zoning Committee will have a public hearing about the demolition appeal and review the historic designation legislation. Any formal offers or information that the parties want to be used in the discussion before the committee must be entered into the record before Tuesday’s meeting, but as of Wednesday evening there were none.
The committee meets 5 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.
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