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Pavel Burian

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State to auction Broadway Palace in Prague

State to auction Broadway Palace in Prague - Czech Points

The state is preparing an electronic auction of the Broadway Palace in Prague with the lowest bid of 1.05 billion crowns. According to the General Director of ÚZSVM Kateřina Arajmu, this is a sale with the highest minimum price during the existence of the office. On its website the Office has already published details of the tender with the auction. The electronic auction itself starts on September 14 and ends on September 16. The house from the 1930s is one of the largest functionalist buildings in the historical center of Prague.

ÚZSVM took over the Broadway Palace complex in 2016 from the then State Railway and Transport Administration (now the Railway Administration). According to the law, the office first offered the palace to other state institutions, but none of them showed interest in it, according to the ÚZSVM. Therefore, according to the ÚZSVM report, the office is now looking for a new owner of the palace through a transparent tender with an electronic auction.

“This sale is unique even in terms of the announced amount. It is a sale with the highest minimum price in the entire history of ÚZSVM,” said the director of the Arajmu office. According to the office, the state received the highest amount so far, namely 790 million crowns, from the sale of the complex on Republic Square in Prague. Another of the highest amounts was brought by the auction of the Prague complex U půjčovny, which was sold for 355.1 million after 100 bids.

Broadway Palace is located between Na Příkopě and Celetná streets. It consists of three interconnected tracts, in which, in addition to the theater, there are also shops, restaurants, and offices. According to documents on the ÚZSVM website, the complex has a total of 5,375 square meters of office space and over 3,000 square meters of retail space, including the space used by the theater. The complex was built between 1936 and 1938 as the Sevastopol Palace, whose authors were the architects Bohumír Kozák and Antonín Černý. The building first served the needs of Italian savings banks and part of the complex also housed apartments. A cinema was established in the basement in 1938, and its premises are now used by the Broadway musical Theater. After 1980, the building was adapted for administrative purposes.

“I believe that the Broadway Palace complex will soon find a new owner who can restore this cultural monument to its former glory and breathe new life into it. This is a unique investment opportunity in a lucrative part of Prague,” she told Arajma.

ÚZSVM was established in 2002 and, in addition to the administration of state property, Czechia represents the place of other organizational units of the state in legal disputes concerning state property. The main source of income of the office consists of sales and leases of land, buildings, and structures, as well as funds that fell to the state from the so-called deaths of the dead without heirs. Last year, the Office’s revenues fell by six percent year on year to 1.39 billion crowns. The most successful year for ÚZSVM was 2015 when it received 1.93 billion in sales. In February 2018, the Office launched an electronic auction system, in which, in mid-March this year, it held 11,742 electronic auctions, of which the state received 960 million crowns.