IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
A former Sam’s Club in La Quinta is being put up for auction.
The building, at Highway 111 and Dune Palms Road, was built in 2008 and has been vacant for three years, said Christopher Maling, senior vice president Colliers International Los Angeles.
The property is owned by a private investment group in Philadelphia. It will be available Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week on www.auction.com. Minimum bid will be $2 million, but Colliers expects the structure to sell for about $8.5 million, or roughly half what it would cost to build today, Maling said.
The one-story building, which is part of The Centre at La Quinta shopping center, covers 136,000 square. Super Walmart, Costco, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kohl’s department store are among the retailers located nearby.
Whoever buys the building probably will subdivide it and lease it to two or three retailers, a process that could be completed in six months.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said Maling, who is in charge of the broker team that is marketing the building. “It’s a great location and it’s in great condition.”
Business at the Sam’s Club didn’t drop because the recession.
“It went out of business because there was a Walmart next door,” Maling said. “Sam’s Club is a cousin to Walmart, and someone with Walmart decided it wasn’t a good idea to have those two stores next to each other at that location.”
About 30 bids are expected to be submitted. Auctioning the building means it should sell faster than it would through a conventional sale, Maling said.
The project will generate about 30 construction jobs and maybe 100 retail jobs, although the latter is impossible to predict until the building is occupied, Maling said.
