Tumwater Brewery Sold

According to the Tacoma News Tribune, an ownership group has purchased the "200,000-square-foot brick (Tumwater) brewhouse, 32 acres of property that surrounds the building and two parking lots".  George Heidgerken and Patrick Rhodes spent $1.4 million in cash on the purchase.  It's important to note that we believe this isn't the entire Tumwater property.  We think there's more to sell.  Mackinac Partners' promise to maximize the value of this asset can't be fully blamed on them given the fact that the water rights were sold out from under the property by Barney. Gut wrenching as it might be, if you check your loan summary list on the Bar-K website, you'll be troubled to find that the original appraisal for the property was $57 million and the loan amount was $26 million.

The article states that "The sellers of the property were Capital Salvage Inc. of California, a group of investors who owned the remaining brewery property after they foreclosed on the previous owner, Barney Ng and his company, Well B Ng."

That is a difficult sentence to untangle.  If the News Tribune article is to be believed, Barney foreclosed on himself, in a sense.  Also, as far as we know, Capital Salvage is not a group of investors -it's Barney and perhaps Kelly.  Jim Weissenborn's sobering August newsletter gives us some insight on this topic.  Weissenborn states the following about Capital Salvage:

Kelly Ng and Barney Ng transferred the ownership and control of Capital Salvage, Inc., which owns six of  the properties on which RE Loans had previously foreclosed, to RE Loans. This will enable RE Loans and Mackinac Partners to control the disposition of these assets directly. RE Loans foreclosed on the property commonly known as “All American Bottled Water,” during August of 2010. This property was owned by an entity controlled by Barney Ng and Barney Ng had agreed to transfer the property to Capital Salvage voluntarily.

 As for the $1.4 million, we presume this will be deposited into REL's interest reserve account and that our good friends from Wells Fargo will enjoy the fruits of this "windfall" while the rest of us pine for the return of our principal and the dream of enjoying our interest payments again.

** UPDATE:  The Olympian ran an article that you can find here:  http://www.theolympian.com/2010/10/02/1390011/historic-olympia-brewhouse-sold.html