This week on Ebby Halliday Realtors’ website, “under contract” appeared on the $6 million listing for the seven-story Faulkner Tower on Gaston Avenue. The property officially went on the market last May, listed by Ebby agent Rob Biesel, son of longtime tower owner Jerry Biesel.
We reached Rob Biesel to ask about the buyer, but he told us he was in a meeting at the Lakewood Whole Foods and might call us back later. We called Jerry Biesel’s office but he was out.
Grant Guest, who had the tower under contract in late 2015, tells us he isn’t the buyer. His plan was to tear down the tower and construct apartments on top of retail, and also build a low-rise complex on the parking lot on Paulus behind the tower. Guest’s company bought and updated the Lakewood Manor apartments next door to the tower, but he says they sold those apartments and are no longer interested in Faulkner Tower.
We also called Lakewood Heights neighbor Jeff Sheehan, who had looked into purchasing it for a client wanting to rehab the tower and use it as a corporate office building. Sheehan says his client isn’t the buyer, either.
The asking price was $4 million when Sheehan was talking to Biesel, and when engineers found that it would cost $1.5 million to rehab the building, Sheehan determined it wasn’t worth it.
“The thing that gets me — I don’t believe he’s had a change of heart of what he wants for the property,” Sheehan says of the $6 million listing price, which he believes is too high. It’s not out of the question, however, for someone to pay that much — “if they have a grander plan.”
Sheehan says he would love to see the building renovated. It’s a quirky building with “small floor plates, and the elevator core takes up so much of the building,” he says, but “you could absolutely lease that space if you fixed it up.” He envisions something like the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., which is also a quirky building but has been rehabbed as a hotel, restaurant and cultural venue.
A buyer willing to pay $6 million likely has bigger plans, Sheehan says. His hope is for someone to buy not just Faulkner Tower and its parking lot further south on Paulus Avenue, but also the adjacent properties on Paulus — the Jack in the Box across the street, the law firm offices between the tower and parking lot, and the vacant building on the other side of the parking lot. By assembling these properties, a developer could scrape the current structures, extend the design of the Lakewood Shopping Center around the corner and down the street, and create a mixed-use project with retailers on the ground floor and high-end apartments or condos on floors above.
Last time we reached out to the Clements and Clements law firm, however, he hadn’t accepted any offers.
“The guy who owns that little law firm, he knows he is the catalyst to whatever’s going to happen,” Sheehan says. “Some industrious, assertive buyer could make it happen.”
Perhaps that industrious, assertive buyer has the Faulkner Tower under contract, but with all of the zoning changes such a project would require, Councilman Philip Kingston, who governs that area, says it’s doubtful.
“Nobody’s been to see me,” he says, “and actually paying money for that thing without talking to me is a really poor idea.”
View photos from Ebby’s Faulkner Tower listing below.
