WALMART BUYS BACK ITS BIGGEST BOXES 
Walmart’s ridiculously humungous Cedar Crossing distribution center near Baytown now belongs to . . . Walmart. Last month the company bought the facility back from its landlord, Texas’s Permanent School Fund, for $104.5 million, or just $4.5 million more than the government entity paid Walmart for it in 2005. The complex consists of 2 separate 2-million-sq.-ft. buildings — encompassing more floor space than 9 Astrodomes — on a 473-acre tract. Under the 30-year lease for the property the company signed with the school fund after the original leaseback, the facility had been exempt from property taxes. [Houston Business Journal; background; awards] Photo: Force Engineering & Testing
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@ commercial RE people: Is that a great deal for WalMart?
Also, does this property have sufficient run-off retention ponds offsetting that impermeable surface?
I wish I knew something smart to say but I have sold and bought back properties before… Heh..
Only 4.5% more then they paid for it 5 years ago. Sounds like a bargain to me.
OK, so now that there is no lease, will Walmart be paying taxes on this piece?
Also, this means more money in the school fund now so will it trickle down to the teachers??
Typical Texas/GOP thought process: We’re broke, so let’s allow the richest retailer in the world to NOT pay property taxes on 4,000,000 sq. ft. of facility on 473 acres.
These people just can’t comprehend that if everyone, including every company, actually paid their taxes, we wouldn’t be in such dire straits.
Yes, they paid $4.5 mil more than the School Fund bought it for, but try providing a little context. I realize most of your resources are devoted to the Hans Bier Haus dispute. but ‘cmon man this is supposed to be a real estate blog.
@movocelot: The school didn’t do too badly either. They bought it for $x, leased it out for what I assume was a good income/return, then sold it later at a profit. My guess is they made a better return than buying 0% return government bonds with those same funds.
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@Jon: The property was owned by the city/school fund, thus no PROPERTY TAXES were due on the property. Walmart didn’t own it, why would they pay property taxes? Now that Walmart owns the land, I’m sure it’ll have normal property taxes due (though the benefits would still be there even if they worked out another deal).
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And the “GOP thought process” you assign to Texas might be the reason Texas accounted for an unusual high % of the total jobs created in this country (something like half since the ‘recovery’?). You want to tax tax tax these business? Why do you think they’re fleeing states like California and coming to Texas?
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How about let’s try to get MORE companies to come here (not less). That increases the job growth here (for more tax rev), gives more people money to spend (tax rev), increases and strengthens the housing market (tax rev), and the overall economy here (tax rev).
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@Matt: What’s out of context in the headline (serious question)
Yes, Jon, only if bottom 50% of people paid ANY taxes at all we wouldn’t be in these dire straits either.
I bet the purchase was due to the new GAAP rules, cheaper to own than lease long term and have to carry on the balance sheet. Jon, your type probably don’t know about balance sheets as the democrats haven’t had a budget in 800 days…I’m just sayin.
I often wonder why Perry & Co didn’t give Amazon.com a pass on taxes when it came to building their distribution center in Dallas… Maybe it’s because middle class people actually get to catch a break (for once) by not paying taxes on their online purchases? Can’t have that now! The only people that should enjoy tax breaks are people who own yachts (they create jobs by now needing to hire illegal immigrants to wash their boat!) and massive corporations like Walmart (they create minimum wage jobs with no insurance benefits!).
Hey, let’s just get rid of taxes entirely, shutter all schools (preparatory and university), get rid of the post office, get rid of the military & the military industrial complex, get rid of medicare and medicaid and social security, get rid of the IRS, get rid of environmental laws (bunch of communists trying to take arsenic out of my water), get rid of road maintenance, get rid of building codes and standards, get rid of government bandwidth allocation, get rid of equal employment opportunity, get rid of workers’ rights, get rid of child labor laws, and best of all, get rid of politicians. We’ll be living in the wild west again, and Rick Perry can jog around in his short shorts shooting rattlesnakes all day long, just like he envisions himself.
@Commonsense: Sure, the bottom 50% pay no taxes….er…except payroll tax, sales tax, and all the other GOP related regressive taxes you cram down our throats while protecting your richest 1% from paying their fair share (which is the lowest in world history btw). Now let’s get back to gutting social security.
@AB: By payroll tax you must refer to Medicare Tax and SS tax which is flat, which means everyone pays same amount (up to an annual max). What you may or may not know is that an employer has to add Employer Contribution (a couple of %) on top of that, which means an employee is not even pulling his full weight on those taxes either.
Sales tax does not discriminate how much money you make so it’s fair.
Texas has no personal income tax which is fair.
The most unfair is the Federal Income Tax where bottom 50% do not pay at all (via not having money withheld or getting 100% of taxes back in a refund). Top 1% pay more than 40% of all Federal Taxes and top 10% pay more than 70% of all Federal Taxes.
So, now let’s talk FAIR SHARE, you slackers.
I’d rather be a conservative nutjob then a liberal with no nuts and no job!
Nope, the most “unfair” is the tax that occurs via the devaluation of the dollar. Since most of the printed dollars go to the rich (and since the rich have excess dollars anyway) this disproportionately affects the poor. This is why wages haven’t kept up with inflation.
It seems that the money trough is crowded and there isn’t enough room for everybody, least of all the people who actually work for a living :)
Now why exactly are the bottom 50% the ones to have to pay to shore up our finances when it’s the old people sucking in entitlements and retarded tax incentives like employer-provided health insurance and mortgage interest deductions that are bankrupting us in the first place? Pay your own share indeed, what a bunch of party-line bs. These are folks that don’t get anything above the standard deduction (ie. deducting mortgage interest, don’t get tax-free health insurance, etc but i suppose this is just them paying for others people tax breaks because they’re slackers, right?
now if we could take Cody’s remark about texas creating most jobs in this country(like 50% over th past 4 years isn’t it?) and look at what percentage of those jobs were minimum wage (again, i believe this was about 50% or 60%) and this probably hints at our real problems, these people are not capable of providing tax revenue without lessening market demand and resulting in more lost jobs/less tax revenue. they don’t have savings like us, every dollar out of their paycheck for taxes is a dollar taken out of the market. if you’re trying to balance a checkbook and create future growth then that would definitely be a stupid way to do it, best to deal with obvious imbalances elsewhere.
Hard to believe this is a RE blog from some of the com
ments these days…
Nope, this is what a successful RE blog looks like. All it has to do is cover a popular subject matter, one that stirs up controversy and encourages interactivity in order to drive page views. That is all that matters. Page views.
That’s probably lost on someone devoting 30 minutes of their life to generate a profit for someone else (mostly Google) by ranting about the inequity of taxation of large companies.