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Cooper Hardware Building For Sale in Columbia Heights – For $8 Million
3459 14th Street, NW
From the files of ‘and I wanna be a professional football player’ comes word of the Cooper Hardware building for sale on 14th Street between Ogden and Newton Streets, NW. The listing says:
“DEVELOPMENT PROJECT OPPORTUNITY!!!! Corner store front with two upper levels with vacant, needing renovation 2/3 bdrm apts. For showing… contact your agent and prove your qualifications to buy. Building 100% vacant.”
It’s yours for $8,000,000.
Category: Columbia Heights, Development, Real Estate, Retail
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Awesome! Thanks for all the great ideas! I knew PoPville would come through. 
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Sounds right for suburbanites.
I guess if you planned to fill the void in market left by the infamous DC fish carryout you may able to afford this…
That has to be a typo, right?
Confirmed typo. Has since been corrected to read $80,000,000.00.
Actual LOL.
That pricing sounds outrageously optimistic. I know real estate in Columbia Heights is valuable, but this is ridiculous.
Don’t be so pessimistic! There may be $7 million in gold coins in a vault in the basement which you can use to fund the total renovation! LOL.
They’re out of their damned minds…
No, they’re trying to avoid the vacant/ blighted property tax.
The father ran this business somewhat successfully for many years. The son is a complete idiot and not capable of carrying it on. This sounds like the son’s idea of cashing out. Good luck.
Precisely
that was my expierence every time i stepped foot in there
and i dont see 8 mill anywhere on that property haha
What a joke.
Someone trippin’
I’m honestly surprised a legitimate agent would risk his reputation by listing this price. When I saw the price I immediately assumed that this was a FSBO.
I guess the agent really want the commission for this.
What’s this really worth? $1.5 million?
Assuming they can sell four 2-3 BR condo’s for $750k a piece, adding about $500k in reno costs (pulling this out of my ass), and the retail/restaurant space below (let’s say it’ll be worth $1mill)… that adds up to 4.5million AFTER presumed reno costs and some profit for the developer.
That’s roughly half the asking price. I take it the owner of the building took over the crack biz from the fish spot?
Again, the numbers above are HIGHLY optimistic.
Is Cooper Hardware a success, and part of the deal? Buying a successful business might up the price. Though 8 million seems absurd even so.
I went to Cooper hardware once. It looked like a Soviet era super market, basically nothing in stock.
Momentary hijack: this reminds me of our favorite local vacant/blighted property, Bacon Funeral Home! Which has had its new construction signs up for oh, several months now (presumably in response to the threat to declare it a vacant/blighted property). Anyone know what’s up with that?
I gotta say… as funny as this price is, it didn’t make me laugh out loud the way the (almost) $1M pricetag on the public housing-looking row house at The Frontiers off 14th street did…
Ugh, it looks like nothing has happened at Bacon except now there’s wood around the grass. It’s gross.
I saw this on a listserv yesterday:
“Due to a scheduling conflict, BCIB has rescheduled Bacon Funeral Home for Wed Mar 13 @ 11am.”
http://dcra.dc.gov/DC/DCRA/Inspections/Housing+Code+Inspections/Board+of+Condemnation
Bwah ha ha. Exorbitant pricing. It’s Columbia Heights, not Georgetown or DuPont.
Anybody know the rules on vacant/blighted taxation? Is there any way a citizen can get involved to get a taxation decision on a “horses ass” like the Bacon Funeral Home blight?
Like most things in government, there is probably some sort of public comment and hearing process. If you got enough people to show up at a hearing or file comments/complaints, you could probably make a difference.
The only issue is keeping on top of when these things happen. They don’t really go out of their way to let citizens in affected areas know when feedback can be given.
It’s all handled by DCRA’s Vacant property unit. If you email them they are very responsive and forthcoming. In the specific case of Bacon, it was listed as Class 4 Blighted last August. It is now listed as class 2 Commercial, so they were apparently able to get an exemption. The new list comes out in March, so we’ll see if they kept the exemption or not.
There’s a big outstanding balance for the property, but that may be reduced since the got the exemption. The SSL is 2835 0124 if you want to report it again or ask DCRA what’s going on.
Oh, and speaking of the property tax, just noticed they have loaded the 2014 proposed assessments on the OTR site. Mine is going up $30K again
.
Where did you access this? I just searched the Real Property Database and they still have my 213 assessed value in there.
I got it from the real property db. Maybe they are still loading them? If you go to https://www.taxpayerservicecenter.com/RP_Search.jsp?search_type=Assessment and search for Square 2835 and Lot 0124 you can see the (should be) blighted Bacon’s proposed 2014 assessment of $785K.
Does anybody know how to interpret the zoning-rights of this place that could justify the price? Could a developer make this place 30 floors high, for example?
That was my thought – not a 30-story building but building a taller structure on that footprint. But the listing suggests that the purchaser is limited to restoring what’s there – it’s billed as a renovation opportunity. If a teardown and build up is possible, the agent really should be advertising it that way. The only way that price works is if it gets the land and the right to construct something bigger and more profitable on it.
Lord, I wish a developer would come in and take over the Exxon gas station on 14th and Parkwood. That lot is a blight on the entire community and the police overtime required to patrol it has to be rediculious. The city should charge this back to the owner of the franchise, and Exxon, the largest company in the world, could certainly spare $30k to clean the lot up. They could start with the owner!
As for the development across the street (also on 14th and Parkwood) it looks like another Beacon funeral home. They haven’t done squat in 3+ weeks.