Fresh Loaf

Good news, people — you can book your fiancee’s parents into the Clermont Hotel this weekend secure in the knowledge that the famed Ponce flophouse won’t be changing hands any time soon.

The hotel’s foreclosure auction, originally scheduled for tomorrow morning on the Fulton courthouse steps, has been pushed back at least 90 days, thanks to a last-minute deal worked out between Inman Park Properties owner Jeff Notrica and his New York-based lender.

Real-estate broker Gene Kansas, who’s marketing the Clermont to potential buyers, says the move helps Notrica’s chances of unloading the property. “He’s a motivated seller,” Kansas says.

The three-month stay of execution also allows the Clermont Hotel Re-Design Contest to proceed. Kansas conceived of the contest as a marketing ploy to gain free publicity (see, it’s working!), but now says it will give Clermont-philes a way to pay homage to a beloved Atlanta landmark. Nearly 500 people have downloaded the contest submission form so far and the deadline isn’t until July 22.

(Photo by Tara-Lynn Pixley)

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Blondie sez: Check out the updated CL article

Got a few million to spare — in cash? Then you could be Blondie’s new landlord!

Next Tuesday, the Clermont Hotel and four other chunks of real estate owned by the troubled Inman Park Properties are scheduled to be auctioned off on the courthouse steps. John Mansour, a local lawyer representing Fairway Capital, the New York-based lender that’s foreclosing on the Clermont, told the AJC early last week that his client was negotiating with IPP founder Jeff Notrica. On Friday, however, Mansour told CL he didn’t have an update.

Based on recent experience, the outlook isn’t good. In fact, it’s pretty dismal.

Last week, I called Danny Glusman, sales manager for Inman Park Properties, in an effort to confirm which of the company’s many parcels in foreclosure had wound up back in the lenders’ hands. I picked random addresses from a long list I’d compiled by searching through public foreclosure notices, but Glusman was able to identify only one — the old Hilan Theatre in Virginia-Highland —that had been spared from foreclosure by a last-minute deal with the lender.

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UPDATE: This article has been expanded with additional reporting.

Little has changed about the Clermont Hotel — or its time-capsule strip club — since Atlanta real estate mogul Jeff Notrica took over the Ponce de Leon Avenue landmark six years ago.

Just as he promised when he bought the 85-year-old building, Notrica resisted the typical developer’s temptation to chop it up into condos or turn it into modern apartments. Downstairs, the storied Clermont Lounge was left untouched and remains its gloriously seedy self.

But it may be that the hands-off approach Notrica, 44, has taken with the Clermont and many of his other properties — a land baron’s acquisitiveness tempered by a collector’s appreciation for each new bauble — has simultaneously helped bring his intown real estate empire crashing down.

Unless a deal is struck between Notrica’s Inman Park Properties and New York-based lender Fairway Capital — or unless a deep-pocketed buyer steps forward — the Clermont Hotel and its lounge will be auctioned off on the courthouse steps July 2.

If that happens, it will be only the latest, if largest, in a long series of foreclosures suffered by Inman Park Properties over the past three months. The company’s apparent meltdown has involved some of the most recognizable and beloved buildings in East Atlanta, Little Five Points, Poncey-Highland and Midtown — causing many residents of those same neighborhoods to cheer the company’s downfall.

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Yes, you read correctly: The fabled Clermont Motor Hotel is up for sale for only the second time in more than a half-century. The seven-story, 130-room hotel has been owned since 2003 by Atlanta’s Inman Park Properties, which bought it from the Loudermilk family. The Loudermilks had operated the Clermont since the ’50s and, the last I heard, still manage the property.

Inman Park Properties has done little to change the hotel, except to lower the rates from $50 to about $35 (that’s nightly, not hourly, wise guy). As company president Jeff Notrica promised when he bought the hotel, the notorious Clermont Lounge has been left untouched. A few Clermont-philes were briefly spooked last year when the company advertised for investment partners to help pay for renovations. But based on the fact that IPP is now trying to unload the hotel, I’m guessing a partner never materialized.

It seemed odd to me that the company, which deals in commercial real estate, is not the listing agent for the Clermont, so I called said agent, Gene Kansas, to see what’s going on. Kansas says he’s been hired to find a buyer who’s a good fit for the hotel — and who’ll not want to meddle with Blondie’s downstairs demimonde.

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