Joy Douglas, general manager of the Urban Development Corporation.

The Urban Development Corporation (UDC) says it has identified a buyer for the Forum hotel property, which for years has been described as a white elephant, and has stood vacant and unused.

The property, which sits beyond the town centre of Portmore, St Catherine, overlooking the beach, was put on the market by the UDC in March.

Over the years, it had been a magnet for squatters.

Joy Douglas, general manger of UDC told the Financial Gleaner that the agency received three offers for the property, and that they had narrowed the selection.

"They were all initially below the reserve price but one came back in a second round, " she said, refusing to divulge the worth of the property. "A lot of people would like to have it but want to have it for nothing as with a lot of public assets. People sometimes view public assets as opportunities."

Douglas while refusing to say who was the buyer, as the sale has not yet been finalised said it was a company with interest in the health sector.

The 11 story 200-room hotel is located on 6.73 hectares or 15.759 acres of land.

It also has 57 self-contained two-bedroom cottages with carports with lot sizes of the cottages ranging from as low as 191.28 square metres to as high as 569.5 square metres.

The property also has 23 unimproved lots with the size varying from 196.11 square metres to 4,000 square metres.

Douglas said, "the property has good internal rounds albeit overgrown".

"The building was assessed structural so the potential purchasers were told about the challenges such as the electrical wiring would have to be examined," she said of the 3-decade-old hotel.

The hotel ceased operations 30 years ago, but over the years has been leased to several organisations. It was last leased to the Jamaica Christian College up to 2005.

The hotel was built in the 1970s and started as the Adventure Inn.

It ceased to operate as a hotel in 1978, following which it came under the UDC's management in 1982. Five years later in 1987, it was handed over to the health ministry but was returned to the UDC in 1995.

Use of funds

Proceeds from the sale of the hotel are to be used for the redeve-lopment of downtown Kingston, the Financial Gleaner learnt.

The Forum Hotel is one of three hotels that the agency has on the market to divest.

The other two are The Jamaica Pegasus hotel, in which the agency has 59.8 per cent majority shares held by subsidiary National Hotels and Properties Limited, and is in the process offloading them; the other Oceana located on the waterfront in downtown Kingston.

dionne.rose@gleanerjm.com

Forum hotel - File photos