WHAT’S IT WORTH?

How much is a hotel in downtown Springfield worth? It’s a good question but difficult to answer. Take the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, for example, which one of the world’s richest men quite literally did in December with a cash offer that took Steve Horve of Forsyth, who had bought the building in 2009, by surprise. Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, a billionaire from Dubai, is now the owner, and he paid $9.3 million, according to records in the Sangamon County recorder’s office and supervisor of assessments office. Horve said that figure isn’t right. “It was twice that,” said Horve, who had paid $6.5 million when he bought the building in a foreclosure auction from the state of Illinois. Horve, who spent millions of dollars fixing up the place after he bought it, said that he didn’t know why county records show a lesser amount. The mystery is nothing compared to the question of what the state of Illinois knew when it sold the hotel just as the hotel market was bottoming out. A trust operating under the umbrella of the state treasurer’s office had two appraisals in hand that the Chicago Sun-Times somehow found after the sale. The newspaper reported in 2010 that two appraisals prior to the sale pegged the hotel’s value at between $17 million and $30 million, depending on whether it was renovated. When Illinois Times asked for appraisals late last year, the treasurer’s office produced one of the appraisals, but dollar figures showing what the hotel was worth had been blacked out. The treasurer’s office could not explain the redactions that apparently had been made years ago.