Is there a pathway to purchase abandoned city property?

[Justin Cabral]

A colleague and myself are looking to open a large (4 or more ballrooms) event venue which can be booked for memorable receptions, corporate events, conventions, ect. We have determined that we need roughly 2.5 to 3 acres for the stand alone structure and parking. Needless to say it has been a challenge to find something and even if we do, I am not fully up to speed on what type of financing options we have. Kind of feels like finding a needle in a haystack. We need help!

Anyway, there is a 4 acre abandoned city owned property in the area we would like to open that used to be an animal shelter. They moved it to a rebuilt state of the art shelter nearby.

Is there a reliable and worthwhile way to contact the city and see if they would consider selling us the property that has been abandoned for some time now? Or maybe lease it to us and rebuild to suit? We would be creating jobs as well as offering something that doesn’t exactly exist in that area.

Any thoughts?

[Ben S.]

There was a property near me which had a portion of it taken through eminent domain.  The owner "gifted" the remaining portion to the county.  That property sat vacant for years.  I asked around and eventually asked the county auditor.  After months of bugging him he put it on the county commission meeting agenda.  After a couple meetings it got labelled as surplus.  After that the auditor was able to put it on the next tax deed sale.  So after months and months of pushing this through I got outbid at the auction...

So I guess if you know it is city owned, go to city hall and start bugging people.