Sale of Cosmopolitan Nearing Completion

Commercial real estate broker Ramsay Ball of Colliers International said the sale of a downtown Fayetteville landmark should be finalized before the end of September.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel, the tallest building in the city at 15 stories, is under contract with Dawn Properties of Hattiesburg, Miss., and the Sam Alley Family of Little Rock.

Ike Thrash is the principal of Dawn Properties. The Alley family has several real estate interests and owns VCC Construction Co.

The two groups are planning a $15 million renovation of the property, which is celebrating its 30th year of operation.

“Getting [the hotel] back to where it used to be is what everyone is hoping for,” Ball said, adding that the renovations should be complete by fall 2012.

The hotel, is Fayetteville’s only full-service hotel but has been under a gloomy cloud of late.

It passed into receivership last year and was acquired in December by ANB Ventures LLC, a company created by the FDIC to sort through the loans made by Bentonville’s ANB Financial NA.

Federal regulators shut down the lender in May 2008, halting the multimillion-dollar renovation effort of Fayetteville businessmen Richard Alexander and John Nock. They bought the Cosmopolitan in 2006.

Ball said the buyers are finalizing their loan information.

New Markets Tax Credits, a seldom-used federal program administered by the U.S. Treasury Department, is one source of the funding. It was established 11 years ago with a goal of kick-starting revitalization efforts.

The program allocated $29.5 billion in 2010.