Developer Interested in AT&T Building
Date Posted: March 25, 2021
Posted In: News,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: There’s new interest in downtown’s vacant AT&T tower, a 44-story single-tenant office building that has sat empty since late 2017.
An interested party has been in discussions with city officials, said Otis Williams, who heads the city’s economic development arm, the St. Louis Development Corp.
“We’ve had recent conversations with potential developers,” he said Monday.
Williams declined to name the interested developer but said the party spoke with city officials last week and was exploring rehabbing the 35-year-old building at 909 Chestnut Street. Williams said the building is in “great shape.”
An online auction for the building had been scheduled for Monday but was canceled, the St. Louis Business Journal first reported.
The building has had offers before, but the gap between the debt on the structure and its current value has made a deal elusive. In 2019, developers Larry Chapman and Bob Clark put an offer on the building but couldn’t reach a deal with bondholders. Chapman said Monday that he wasn’t involved in a new development team.
AT&T sold the building in 2006 for $205 million to Minto Holdings of Florida and Inland American Real Estate Trust in a deal financed by investment bank Bear Stearns, which failed two years later. When AT&T’s lease ended in September 2017, about 2,000 employees relocated to buildings at 801 Chestnut and 1010 Pine streets.