The Dublin Pub in New Hyde Park was put up for auction nearly a year ago but was never sold, and with debt on the property exceeding its market value, the property may now sell for significantly less than its market value.
The real estate agent who handled the auction, Misha Haghani, president of Paramount Realty, said two bids received around the time of last year’s July 24 auction never panned out.
And Haghani said two more recent bids Dublin Pub owners Stan Majewski and Scott Blitzer considered acceptable failed to produce a deal when the bidders wouldn’t – or couldn’t – go forward with it.
“We received bids that have been accepted, but the deals have fallen apart,” Haghani said last week. “The value of the property is less than the debt and most likely it will be a short sale.”
A “short sale” is a real estate deal in which proceeds of the sale will fall short of the balance of debts secured by liens against the property. The property owner cannot afford to repay the liens’ full amounts and the lien holders agree to accept less than what is owed on the debt.
One of the recent prospective deals was a short sale, Haghani said, proposed by a brother and sister who wanted to open a liquor store on the location at 2002 Jericho Turnpike.
It fell through when the buyers balked at having their money for the sale held in escrow for six months until the deal could be consummated, Haghani said.
In the other case, a man who had made an offer had to go to India to tend to his ailing mother before he could close the deal.
Haghani said there’s still a possibility that deal may happen, but he said future prospects for sale of the pub remain uncertain.
“Hopefully, he comes back and we make a deal,” Haghani said. “Unfortunately it is what it is.”
Apart from the deals the owners verbally accepted, he said numerous offers have been rejected by the sellers in the past year for one reason or another. He said some people keep “circling,” but haven’t made acceptable offers.
Auction information prepared by Paramount set the opening bid for the bar property at $899,000 last summer. The auction information indicated an appraised value of $1.4 million as of October 2011.
The beginning of the end of the pub started when the state Liquor Authority board revoked the bar’s license on April 23, 2013 after suspending the license in late March for allegedly selling alcohol to underage customers on two recent occasions, according to state Liquor Authority spokesman William Crowley.
The state Liquor Authority had found the bar in violation of state liquor regulations on several occasions over the past decade.
In the suspension order issued in March, S & S Pub – the company that owned Dublin Pub – was also cited for failing to comply with conditions in a previous order.
Last April Haghani said the state Liquor Authority in April had offered the owners two options – to fight the revocation or surrender the license and make an argument that they did no wrong.
“They voluntarily surrendered their liquor license and they have not attempted to get their license back because they don’t want to spend more money on it. So they’re stepping away,” Haghani said prior to last year’s auction.
Haghani said Majewski and Blitzer had worked at the bar for several years before buying it from one of its four original owners in 2001. The partners had invested more than $1 million in the 6,441-square-foot facility, which had been a bar or a pub since 1936 and was operating as the Dublin Pub since 1968, Haghani said.
Efforts to reach Majewski and Blitzer for comment were unavailing.
