Washington – Looking for a stately home or opulent office overseas? One in a posh neighborhood or overlooking an exotic capital? Maybe with a glorious or infamous past? The U.S. government may have a deal for you.
From Kinshasa to Katmandu, Bangkok to Bogota, U.S. embassies, ambassadorial residences and other diplomatic digs are up for sale as the State Department moves its employees to more secure locations, upgrades facilities and combines operations in multipurpose compounds.
Some 29 properties worth more than $205 million are now on the market in 21 countries, including a huge and historic embassy annex in the heart of London, large chancery buildings in Panama, Nicaragua and Nepal and extraordinary homes fit for envoys in Belize and Venezuela.
With an asking price of $180 million, the immense former Navy Annex fronting Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair district is probably beyond most budgets. Ditto for the old U.S. Embassy in Nepal, $6 million, described as a “grand colonial estate.” But more modest accommodations – apartments and single-family houses once occupied by junior embassy officers in Peru and Poland – are available, too, to say nothing of commercial and industrial space in Congo, Cameroon, Mali and Thailand.
All have been declared “excess property” and listed for sale with private real estate brokers by the State Department’s bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, which manages more than 3,500 U.S. government properties in 193 countries.
In search of a fixer-upper? The former U.S. ambassador’s residence in Libya can be yours for a cool $1.5 million, marked down from its multimillion-dollar estimated market value because of damage it sustained in anti-American riots and demonstrations in the 1980s and ’90s.
In Canada, $2.25 million will get you the three-story house in the leafy upscale Ottawa suburb of Rockcliffe Park that enjoyed a period of celebrity as the home of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the 1990 movie “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge.”
A pair of four-bedroom townhouses in Warsaw’s trendy Mokotow district are available for $400,000 each, as are nearly twin homes in Lima, Peru, for $215,000 a pop.
The complete real estate listings can be seen online at www.state.gov/obo/c21629.htm.
