GOLDMAN SACHS FOLLOWING BARGAIN SALE OF BILL KALLOP’S YACHT BY MARKING DOWN HIS RIVER OAKS HOUSE, TOO 
Having already cashed out on the retired offshore oil and gas billionaire’s 217-ft. yacht Natalia Natita after he defaulted on a loan that it backed, Goldman Sachs is now attempting to sell Bill Kallop’s 5-bedroom mansion at 1708 River Oaks Blvd. Some of the highlights inside: a glass-domed living room and colonnaded natatorium with a sky ceiling mural above it. The property was previously listed for sale earlier this year at $15.9M but shortly after, Kallop filed for Chapter 11 (through his punnily-named business entity R.O. Mance 1708 LLC) and the home fell into foreclosure. The new asking price is a bargain: $9.75M. But it’s still nowhere near the markdown the bank took on the boat last year, which it sold to a Maltese buyer for $27.5M after originally asking $60M, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Liz Hoffman. At that time, Kallop’s other properties totaled “at least eight residences, including a Peruvian mansion, two homes in the Dominican Republic and a working cattle ranch in Texas,” reported Hoffman. [Wall Street Journal; walkthrough] Photo: HAR
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Foreclosure
Lookie what an investment group headlined by former NBA star Magic Johnson walked away with after Tuesday’s Harris County foreclosure auction: the Hotel Icon — and probably for less than $27 million, since that was the unanswered starting bid for the 135-room boutique hotel. The building at 220 Main St. Downtown is of course no stranger to foreclosure auctions: Randall Davis and some investment partners brought it home from one in 2002, then redressed it as the Icon. And the building began its life as the Union National Bank. LA’s Lowe Enterprises — also the owners of Austin’s Driskill Hotel — bought the hotel from Davis’s group in 2006, but since defaulted on $46 million of debt. That’s what the joint venture of 2 joint ventures — one of them Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds, part owner of the Marq*E Entertainment Center on I-10 — bought up on the rebound, and at a deep discount, this week. The new owners tell the HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson they’re hoping to turn over operation of the hotel to “a luxury chain such as The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. or W Hotels & Resorts.”
- Hotel Icon deal a slam-dunk [Houston Business Journal]
Photo: Facilities Online
THANK YOU FOR LEAVING YOUR PLACE FOR THE BANK IN SUCH GOOD CONDITION 
“We mowed the lawn this weekend, so we’re giving it to them in nice shape.†— Dougal Cameron of Cameron Management, leader of an investment group that delivered the freshly LEED-certified and entirely vacant 12-story 2000 St. James Place office building just south of Tanglewood to Wachovia Bank (now a part of Wells Fargo) in a sparsely attended foreclosure ceremony earlier this month. Minute Maid moved out of the building in February 2009 — about a year and a half after Cameron’s investment group bought it; the building has had no tenants since then. [Houston Business Journal]
