Lenders who “bought back” the Bon Carré Technology Center in a foreclosure sale on the steps of the federal courthouse in mid-August are offering the property up for auction in early October, according to an online listing.
The minimum bid for the 713,000-square-foot business park has been set at $12 million.
That’s just a fraction of the $36.1 million mortgage Bon Carré’s former owner, Commercial Properties Realty Trust, defaulted on in 2017, and it’s not clear that the seller would be willing to let the property go for so little.
Rather, the low starting bid is likely intended as a way to generate interest in the former shopping center turned business park, which is currently 67% leased with a variety of tech-related and business tenants.
“They’ve got to put a price out there to attract investors and usually you drive up price by increasing competition,” says commercial broker Matthew Laborde of Elifin Realty. “I’ve already got people calling me wanting to pick my brain about it.”
It is unclear from the website whether there is a reserve or minimum price, the seller would be willing to accept. Agents with Colliers International, the firm listing the property, could not be reached for comment this morning.
What the property might fetch at the two-day online auction is anyone’s guess, according to commercial appraiser Wesley Moore of Cook, Moore, Davenport and Associates. Occupancy rates have fallen from a high of nearly 90% just five years ago, and a 10-year abatement that had capped the Bon Carré property tax bill at just $80,000 a year expired in 2017.
Those are among the reasons Commercial Properties, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s real estate company, defaulted on its mortgage last year. The firm had tried unsuccessfully to sell the property and at one point received an offer of some $28 million. but that was too little to cover the cost of its debt.
“Sure it will generate interest,” Moore predicts. “But it is attractive only if it is expected to generate positive cash flow.”
