The World Trade Center in downtown Baltimore lost $1.3 million in the fiscal year ending this July.
Officials with the Maryland Port Administration, which has operated the building since it opened in 1977, said last month they would bid out management and rental sales to a private company.
The request for proposals for that contract will go out by the end of the year, said Christopher Patusky, director of the Maryland Department of Transportation?s office of real estate, who added a final contract could be signed by next August.
“I think we?re going to be able to fill the building,” Patusky said. “I don?t think the building is snakebit. … It?s such a great location.”
The private company would oversee all leasing and operations. The cost to the state for this service had not been determined, Patusky said.
In the fiscal year ending in July 2003, the World Trade Center brought in $564,016, according to Richard Scher, spokesman for the Maryland Port Administration. Two months later, Hurricane Isabel flooded the building?s lower levels, closing it for about a month.
In following years, state leaders began discussing selling the building, cooling off possible tenants. In fiscal 2006, the building lost $27,573, and last year the building cost the state about $1.3 million, he said.
“If you put yourself in the tenant?s shoes, that [time period] is when there was talk about selling the building, there was a lot of uncertainty,” Scher said. “There was instruction given not to sell long-term leases.”
Office space in Baltimore?s highest-profile buildings averaged between $25 and $30 per square foot last year, according to the Downtown Partnership?s 2006 annual report. The average was up slightly from $24 to $28 the year before, according to the report.
Space in the building averages about $18.75 per square foot, and when the Department of Business and Economic Development moves in next October, the building will be about 70 percent full, Patusky said.
On Wednesday, the state Board of Public Works voted to allow the Department of Transportation to negotiate its own leases, without first bringing them to the board for approval, as long as the sale price was more than $22 per square foot.
“It was our strategy from pretty early in the administration to use those two prongs,” Patusky said, “to get the authority to negotiate leases, and to get a professional management company to run the building.”
