The building that housed Morris Sokol Furniture for decades on upper King Street has sold for $22.5 million.
Vanderking LLC, managed by Frederick Simon and Michael Shuler, bought the property at King and Reid streets on Wednesday with Greenwich, Connecticut-based Wexford Capital, through a company called Vanderking 510 LLC, The Post and Courier reported. The newspaper called it one of the biggest local real estate deals of 2016.
Simon, of Connecticut, owns other property in Charleston. Shuler is with the real estate firm King Street Commercial.
Simon declined to say what the group plans for the vacant building. “We are evaluating our alternatives,” he told the newspaper.
Seller Joe Sokol said he did not know of any plans for the site. “It wasn’t the highest offer, but we felt it was the best offer for us,” he said.
The 37,000-square-foot store closed last fall after 94 years in business, when Sokol, 83, decided to retire and no family members wanted to take it over, the newspaper reported. The sale covers the two-story showroom, a 10,000-square-foot storage room and a 24,000-square-foot vacant lot facing Reid and Woolfe streets. The family kept two 18,000-square-foot warehouses on East Bay and Meeting streets.
Sokol said his father, Morris Sokol, started the business in 1921 “with a dream and a delivery cart” and opened a store at 510 King St. in 1929 that was about half the size of the current one.
The site sits in a fast-changing stretch of upper King Street, where two Hyatt hotels recently opened at the Midtown site. Last July, city documents showed a plan to build a 603-space parking deck on the neighboring Hughes Lumber property to help lure a national retailer to the Sokol building. The city’s Board of Architectural Review denied a request to demolish the lumber business in December.
Hughes Lumber co-owner John W. Burn said that, to the best of his knowledge, the Sokol property is no longer tied to that project.
