NEWS AND OBSERVER NEWSPAPER STORY: Our client, Kennedy Wilson Auction Group was featured in a story about an upcoming Real Estate Auction in Raleigh, NC.
Quorum Center in downtown Raleigh to auction off 14 condos
A second downtown Raleigh condominium project is reverting to an auction to reduce inventory.The Residences at Quorum Center announced this morning that it would auction its remaining 14 condos on Sunday, March 20 in the downtown Marriott on Fayetteville Street.
Starting bids for the condos range from $120,000 to $325,000. That’s significantly less than the $300,000 starting price listed on the project’s website.
On Halloween last year, West, the 17-story condo project in Glenwood South, auctioned off 32 of its units and recorded $8 million in sales in a single day.
The auctions are a response to a downtown marketplace where a handful of condo projects are going after a shrinking number of prospective buyers.
As the sluggish sales environment has dragged on, more and more projects face pressure to reduce inventory.
One downtown condo project, Hue, failed last year without selling a single unit and has since been turned into rentals.
Bloomsbury Estates, a 56-unit condo project, has sold just 10 units, according to Wake County property records.
Highwoods Properties has sold 114 of the 139 condo units in the RBC tower. Just 14 of those sales happened over the last year.
The 15-story Quorum Center, developed by Ted Reynolds and his son David, is located on Jones Street. It has a total of 37 units.
The Reynolds took out two loans out on the property, according to Wake County property record.
They borrowed $32 million from Regions Bank in 2005, and $7.45 million from Southern Community Bank and Trust in April 2008.
Next month’s auction will be a “reserve auction,” meaning the seller reseveres the right to accept or decline any bids.
The West auction was similarly structured, although the seller ended up accepting all the winning bids.
The winning bids in the West auction ranged from $169,050 to $425,250 a unit, which were as much as 40 percent lower than earlier list prices.
The prices were also significantly lower than the market rate prices paid by the 80 people who had bought units in West since it opened in 2008.