LONGMONT — What can you buy for $8.5 million?
How about a 12,000-square-foot home on Arrowleaf Court in Boulder? It’s listed at $8.5 million.
That amount isn’t even enough to buy some other properties in the area, though. You’d have to come up with $12 million to get into a home for sale on Rozena Court in Hygiene.
Get $9 million together and you’ve got yourself a farmhouse that’s currently for sale on Pike Road just west of Longmont.
Sounds like a lot of money — until you consider that NewMark Merrill Mountain States came up with $8.5 million and got itself a whole shopping mall.
When it was announced last week that the company bought the troubled Twin Peaks Mall, some observers
viewed the purchase price as shockingly low.
“It’s incomprehensible,” said Scott Franklund of Legendary Properties, a Boulder company that deals in luxury Colorado real estate. “It was the buy of the century.”
He ticked off several homes for sale in the area whose cost approaches what NewMark paid for Twin Peaks.
What makes the deal especially surprising is that former owner Panattoni Development Co. paid $33.6 million for the 75-acre, 650,000-square-foot mall in 2007, he said. That’s roughly a 75 percent drop in price.
“You just don’t see that,” Franklund said.
Every property is different, and every real estate transaction comes with its own circumstances, so comparisons can be misleading. But they offer some perspective. Last year, for example, Circle Capital sold Front Range Community College’s two Longmont campus buildings plus a 152,000-square-foot building for more than $28 million.
Twin Peaks Mall, which opened in 1985, has struggled in recent years. Foreclosure proceedings were brought against the property in September, and Panattoni owed Bank of America $26.5 million. The mall is only about half occupied.
The mall’s many problems lead Don Macy to believe the mall’s selling price was appropriate.
“It didn’t surprise me,” said Macy, of Macy Development Co., which owns much of the commercial property west of the mall. He added that the selling price was “essentially the land value.”
Quentin Young can be reached at 303-684-5319 or qyoung@times-call.com.