The El Jebel Shrine building in Uptown is going to auction.
Last week, Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones approved a receiver’s plan to auction the building at 1770 Sherman St. and its adjacent parking lot through the Crexi website.
The five-story, 46,000-square-foot Shrine building was built in 1906 by the Shriners, a fraternal organization that used it as a meeting hall. It is a Denver city landmark and Historic Denver, a local nonprofit, has a conservation easement for both the exterior and interior of the building.
Since 2016, the building has been owned by LLCs managed by attorney Robert Lubin, who lives in California. They paid $12.4 million that year.
Lubin previously told BusinessDen that the acquisition was funded by EB-5 investors — foreigners who can get green cards by investing in job-creating projects in the United States.
The building has been in foreclosure since spring 2024. That May, at the request of a lender, Denver-based Cordes & Co. was appointed as receiver overseeing the property.
In July, Cordes & Co. told Jones the property should be sold because “significant sums” of unpaid property taxes were owed dating back to 2022.
“Further, Historic Denver holds a conservation easement on the Property and is requesting that the deferred maintenance noted in their past annual inspection reports be cured,” the receiver’s filing stated. “The Receiver has no means of paying for either of these very significant expenses.”
Attorneys for Rubin’s entities pushed back on the auction request, asking to be given at least the month of August to reach a settlement with Fairbridge Strategic Capital, which loaned ownership $8.1 million in January 2023.
Rubin sat on the request for weeks and, when August passed with no news of a settlement, approved it on Sept. 19.
Rick Egitto, a former Avison Young broker who last year founded his own firm CRE Solutions, is helping to market the property. He said Wednesday that an auction date had yet to be set.
The Shrine building is currently leased by Non Plus Ultra for occasional use as an event venue. But Cordes & Co. said the company hasn’t been able to fully utilize the building due to an inoperable elevator. Earlier this year, Non Plus Ultra sued Denver for denying it a liquor license; that case is ongoing.
A buyer might not be just interested in the Shrine itself. Its parking lot to the south has been eyed by multiple developers over the past 20 years, including Donald Trump a decade before he became president.
But despite occasional grandiose proposals, nothing has ever broken ground.
Read more from our partner, BusinessDen.
