It sat vacant for years as those of us in town speculated about what might become of it. Now the yellow Georgian-style building at the corner of Cordaville and Southville Roads will go up for auction on November 17.
An article in the Metrowest Daily News says:
The property, owned by High Tech Real Estate since 1985, was predicted to sell quickly based upon its close proximity to Southborough’s MBTA station and the busy crossroads of Rte. 85 and Southville Road. But a free-falling commercial real estate market halted progress.
The 10,600 square foot building is assessed at $1.3 million. At one point last fall it was on the market for just under $3 million.
I saw a few people hanging around the building on the 17th. Does anyone know what happened with the auction? I can say that many of us down on the south side of Southborough desperately hope something good comes of this building.
This shows you what you get when you build the wrong type of building in the wrong place. A number of Southborough residents, who know what they are talking about on the subject, raised issues of scale, context, and consistency with the Town Master Plan and the village component (that is, they brought them up as soon as the town was belatedly made aware of the project, which was partway down the path by then), and were brushed off.
As a result the town and the village of Southville/Cordaville has been left with this big “yellow elephant” sitting vacant for several years. I suspect that retailers/vendors/potential tenants might have been more attracted to a building that actually fit a village commerce context, rather than a monstrosity that doesn’t know what it wants to be – is it a giant house? A public building? What? (and, I suspect the high rents I hear the developer was asking to offset what they paid for the development don’t help either).
The dillapidated Ipanema building was an eyesore, yes, but this is too in its own obtrusive way… Hopefully something good will eventually come of the situation.
Localvore: Your points have some validity, but that ship has sailed. Sometime (sooner rather than later, I hope), the yellow building will be occupied and it”ll feel like it’s been occupied forever.
The building is a case study in how *not* to undertake a project, isn’t it? The developers built the wrong building on the wrong site at the wrong time, then stubbornly clung to their inflated pricing scheme even when the writing was on the (attractive yellow) wall.