Post office going on market
The downtown Mankato post office will be listed for sale soon, likely in November. File photo
Posted: Friday, October 30, 2015 12:40 pm
Mankato Free Press
MANKATO — The Mankato post office building will be listed for sale, likely in the next month.
In June 2014, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been hemorrhaging money in recent years, announced it would sell the historic building on the 400 block of South Second Street and move into a smaller space.
“The building will be listed by the end of the year,” said Postal Service spokesman Peter Nowacki.
An appraiser is evaluating the building and it is likely to be listed by mid- to late-November.
In the 17 months since the announcement, the City Center Partnership formed a task force to seek ideas about possible reuses for the building. Many of those ideas focused on arts-based organizations in the building with the hope a private developer may be able to redevelop the property for a mix of private and public uses.
But potential reuse of the building will depend first on the price tag the Postal Service puts on the property. Local real estate appraisers have said putting a value on such a large and unique property in the downtown is difficult because nothing like it has come on the market.
The Blue Earth County assessor places a value of $1.46 million on the property. The county sets values on properties even when they are, like the post office, tax exempt.
The 1896 three-story Kasota stone building is massive, consisting of 41,000 square feet.
The post office is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but the designation puts virtually no restraints on how it is reused.
A look at other post office properties for sale around the country gives a little hint of current asking prices, but it’s difficult to compare different-size buildings in different cities and whether they are in a part of the city that is valuable or downtrodden.
Most of the 32 post office buildings for sale range from about $400,000 to $2.7 million. (A post office in pricey Los Angeles is listed for $8 million.)
A slightly smaller post office than Mankato’s, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, is being offered for $1.2 million and one double Mankato’s size in Topeka, Kansas, is for sale for $1.6 million.
There are only a handful of postal workers still in the downtown building, which was once a bustling center for area postal services. Mail carriers and others who had been based downtown have been moved to a mail-processing center off of Third Avenue on the edge of Mankato.
The Postal Service said it will find a smaller site to offer mail counter services but has not said where it will be.
Follow Tim Krohn on Twitter @TimKrohn
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