There’s a new owner behind the desk at a Colfax motel. Inspire Investment Group bought the All Inn Motel, former home of the Rockbar, last week for $3.55 million. It’s a site company head Brian Toerber said he’s eyed for three years, and he’s looking at redeveloping the building.
“We’re not sure what we’re going to do yet but we’re very interested in micro units,” Toerber said. “We’re underwriting some scenarios where we keep the structure but fully rehab it into micro units, basically keeping the hotel rooms in place like they are today.”
Inspire’s newest property covers about 0.77 acres at Colfax Avenue and Milwaukee Street. The building still operates as a hotel with rooms renting at $65 a night. Toerber’s group picked up the site at a bankruptcy auction held in March and closed on the deal Monday.
The site was one of two properties previously owned by Denver businessman Jesse Morreale that have slogged through bankruptcy and foreclosure over the last three years. The other was the First Avenue Hotel building on Broadway, last home to El Diablo restaurant, which sold at auction in December.
Toerber said the Colfax motel was also slated to sell in December, but that sale got pushed back. The delay proved fortuitous for Toerber, who couldn’t put together a bid for an auction late last year.
“I had a high level of interest for it but December rolled around and I had focused on other projects,” Toerber said. “When I realized it didn’t sell, I took another look at the deal.”
The Colfax building ended up going under the gavel at an auction in the middle of March, Toerber said. Inspire Investment Group was one of three bidders. The firm financed the deal with a loan from Peoples National Bank.
Toerber said he’ll really get down to hammering out a development plan for the building this summer. He estimated he could get between 54 and 76 micro units and have ground floor retail space. That figure is contingent on whether or not Inspire can build another floor on top of the motel, Toerber said. The building is four stories tall but the site is zoned for five.
Toerber added that there may be space to build a second, new building in a later development phase. He also hasn’t ruled out scraping the site and starting over – but for the moment keeping the motel building seems like the best plan.
“I think it makes a lot of sense to keep the existing shell, but make it look brand new,” Toerber said. “It could be cleaned up and become a nice building.”
The 57-year-old hotel building lost its most well-known tenant, the Rockbar, in 2012. That watering hole shuttered after a seven-year run when the city denied an application to re-up its liquor license.
City officials cited a high volume of police visits and crime reports at the Rockbar before nixing its liquor license, according to a Denver Post story from 2012.
It could be a couple of years before the development breaks ground, Toerber said. Right now Inspire’s focus is a couple of blocks west at Detroit and Colfax, where the company is wrapping up construction on the 50-unit Detroit Terraces apartment building.
Craine Architecture designed Detroit Terraces and Hyder Construction is the general contractor. Toerber said he hasn’t yet enlisted an architect or construction company for the motel site, but hopes to bring Craine and Hyder over for the new project.
The motel’s proximity to Detroit Terraces was one reason Toerber wanted to buy the building, and he’s taking a little bit of inspiration from his apartment development for his micro motel plan. Detroit Terraces, which will open this summer, also has apartments as small as 400 square feet.
“If you’re going to do something in this environment today, in these late innings, that’s where I’d focus instead of larger luxury units,” Toerber said. “I think we’ve got enough of those.”
By Burl Rolett
Burl Rolett is a BusinessDen reporter who covers commercial real estate and the business of sports. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University.
http://www.businessden.com/2016/04/21/rockbar-hotel-sold-out-of-bankruptcy/
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PRINCE MAY BE WORTH MUCH LESS THAN PREVIOUSLY ESTIMATED IN DEATH
Prince’s sister says the superstar musician had no known will when he died, and filed paperwork Tuesday asking a Minneapolis court appoint a special administrator to oversee his estate.
The amount of money Prince left behind is unclear. A fortune originally estimated in the hundreds of millions could be much, much less, and future earnings off the pop star’s catalogue and brand could dwarf what he died with.
Prince owned a dozen properties in and around his famous Paisley Park complex in suburban Minneapolis: mostly rural pieces of land and some houses for family members. Public records show those properties were worth about $27 million in 2016.
Prince sold over 100 million albums on his lifetime, according to
Warner Music Group. And Pollstar, a concert industry magazine, said that in the years that his tours topped the charts — 10 years over four decades performing — the tours raked in $225 million in ticket sales. Prince’s best-earning touring year, when he took in $87.4 million, was 2004, the year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and two decades after the soundtrack to “Purple Rain” went multi-platinum.
But what remained in Prince’s hands is, by any estimate, less than the sum of ticket and album sales. In every record deal, a cut goes to the label, background performers and music publishers, though Prince published and wrote his own songs. Concert ticket revenue is split among the venue, the promoter, staff and the cost of travelling around. And Prince was known to throw expensive parties. Court battles in recent years suggest money wasn’t free flowing.
In April 2013, Prince lost a suit filed in New York State’s Supreme Court brought by perfume maker Revelations Perfume and Cosmetics Inc. for failing to promote the “3121” perfume line. He was ordered to pay $4.4 million; he never did. Instead, plaintiff lawyers went searching for assets, found about $3 million in various Minnesota bank accounts, and used court orders to freeze them, according to Brian Slipakoff, a New York lawyer who represented the perfume maker. Prince settled for a lower amount shortly after.
Prince encountered tax difficulties several times over the years as well, including owing back taxes to France in 2012, which he paid up, and overdue property taxes around $450,000 in 2010. In 2013, the IRS filed a federal tax lien against him in Carver County, Minnesota, Court for $1.6 million. What happened with that case is unclear. Records on file with Carver County, where Paisley Park is located, show that he was up to date on his property taxes when he died.
Estimates of how much licensing his personal brand will bring in after death, however, reach to the purple clouds.
“He was as big as they get,” said Mark Roesler, chief executive of CMG Worldwide, which handles licensing for the estates of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and other late stars.
Roesler estimates Prince’s post-mortem earnings will match top-earning deceased celebrities like Elvis Presley, whose estate made $55 million in 2015, according to Forbes magazine.
But Prince could even dwarf that amount. Michael Jackson’s estate, for example, has made over $1 billion since his death in 2009, Forbes reports.
Nelson asked that Bremer Trust, a corporate trust company, be named administrator of the estate. The court documents say Breber Bank provided financial services to Prince for many years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
[Original article contains a time line of Prince’s life, record releases, etc. Very interesting.]