The Packard Plant, Detroit's 3.5 million-square-foot ruin porn theme park, is facing a crucial deadline at 3:00 pm today. (Did everyone make sure the development clocks fell back?) That is when Bill Hults must pay $1,900,300 to secure ownership of the dilapidated money pit towards his dream of renovating it into housing and stuff. On Friday, he plunked down a $100,000 deposit for tax-foreclosed property, which wound up in the last Wayne County tax auction. While that was non refundable, there are still plenty of reasons to be suspicious that The Hults may not come through. For instance, his previous failed attempt to snatch up the property for less money than is currently due.
Back in September, Hults had worked out a deal to buy the Plant before it went into the tax auction, for the sum of $974,000. This was the amount of back taxes owed, but the deal fell through, seemingly because he could not get the funds together in time. What does it feel like to be paying about a $1M more about a month later? We don't really want to know but sounds painful.
In the event that the cash comes together, the Hults plans on constructing a 120-room luxury hotel, 750-plus loft residences and 1,500 single-family homes on the site. To build that, he'd need roughly $750-$850 M. So here's hoping someone had a great night at the MGM Grand slots.
Should Hults fall through today, a bidder named Fernando Palazuelo who offered up $2,002,000 will be approached to purchase Packard. The Wayne county treasurer says he'd knock off $400,000 from that price, because of the bidding war with with what turned out to be totally fake offering prices.
Curbed will keep you posted.
· Developer submits $100,000 deposit on Packard Plant [The Detroit News]
Wanye County Nixes Top Packard Bid, Crawls Back to Bill Hults [Curbed Detroit]
· Previous Packard Plant Coverage [Curbed Detroit]
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