16 churches for sale worth $28m

The 16 churches the Archdiocese of Boston put up for sale this week are worth about $28 million, according to local tax assessors.

However, the individual properties range vastly in size and age and the valuation may exclude other buildings that will be included in any sale.

Assessments range from $669,200 for St. Peter in Malden to $4.16 million for St. James the Apostle in Arlington, or an average $1.7 million each. The properties are in good condition and most could be converted to housing, but zoning fights, conflicting community desires, and an air of financial desperation surrounding the Catholic institution could depress prices and delay redevelopment.

And while brokers have already heard from dozens of potentially interested buyers, developers may want to consider one more hurdle before submitting a bid: final approval from the Vatican.

The archdiocese has set no prices -- just requests for bids over the next three months for the buildings, which range in size from little Sacred Heart in Medford, at 8,785 square feet, to St. Joseph in Salem, at 89,263 square feet.

"There isn't a set dollar goal" for how much the archdiocese hopes to generate from the sales, said David W. Smith, chancellor of the archdiocese. The Archdiocesan Real Estate office and an advisory committee will review the bids and make recommendations to the chancellor, who will then forward the recommendations to Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley. Final permission for some sales could come from the Holy See.

The archdiocese is selling the property in the face of a mounting financial crisis. O'Malley has pleaded with the public to understand the need for church closings and said the archdiocese is running an annual deficit of $10 million a year and has an $80 million unfunded pension liability.

It's unclear how much selling these churches -- targeted for sale because they have already been closed -- will help the archdiocese's financial crises.

Assessing figures on properties of nonprofit organizations like churches -- which don't pay any taxes -- are notoriously unreliable indicators of the actual value of the properties, executives in the industry cautioned this week. Assessments are often lower than market value. But with some of the churches, local officials may have overvalued the property to seek a higher state reimbursement for taxes the communities forgo from the nonprofit landholders.

Regardless, real estate executives familiar with the kind of church properties that are going on the market said they doubted that the value to developers will be exceptionally high.

While church properties in Boston and Cambridge have recently sold in the range of $5.5 million to $6.3 million, a smaller church in Maynard sold for $1.3 million, according to brokers.

James Elcock, an executive vice president with Meredith & Grew, which is marketing four of the churches, said similar institutional properties that his firm has brokered have sold in the range of $75 to $125 per square foot. "That's the range where 90 percent of these transactions pencil out." For tiny Sacred Heart in Medford, that could mean a sales price of less than $700,000.

However, market value could well hinge on what the community where the church is located allows a developer to do.

Mayor Stanley J. Usovicz Jr. of Salem doesn't believe St. Joseph in his city will sell for its assessed value of $3 million.

He fears developers will check out the 2.5-acre piece of land in a densely settled residential area and take a pass, concluding that the amount of investment needed to rehabilitate the site wouldn't generate a sufficient return.

"The greatest danger to any community is that these churches remain vacant," he said.

In Arlington, the director of planning, Kevin O'Brien, said there is concern that the St. James and St. Jerome churches for sale in that town could be converted to large-scale condo projects.

"The archdiocese wants to get top dollar, and developers could be tempted to put up too much housing," he said. "That could cause an uproar."

In Quincy, Star of the Sea parish -- assessed at $1.68 million for both the church and the rectory -- is in a neighborhood zoned for single-family homes with a minimum lot size of nearly 8,000 square feet, said Dennis Harrington, Quincy's director of Planning and Community Development.

"Maybe you'd get $1 million for the rectory and another $1 million for the church, but what good is that if it devastates the community?" said Maureen Mazrimas, a longtime parishioner, former zoning official, and real estate agent.

Meanwhile, because details of the archdiocese's financial crisis are so widely known, Secretary of State William F. Galvin said this week he did not expect the church properties to fetch a premium. Church officials have "pretty much put themselves in a position of a distress sale," he said.

Other properties among the 16 may be more appropriate for continued use by a religious or other nonprofit institution, said Thomas A. Walsh, a longtime Boston real estate executive who has been working as a consultant for the archdiocese since mid-August.

Since Monday, when the archdiocese named the first of the 67 properties it intends to sell, dozens of potential buyers have been making inquiries. Only three properties among the 16 that went on the market this week are not in residential areas, Walsh said. St. Margaret in Brockton is in a commercially zoned area, and at least a portion of Assumption in Bellingham is in a business district. Nuestra Senora del Carmen in Lowell is in a mixed business and residential district.

The main building on the Brockton property, which is assessed at $2.7 million, is not in good condition and might have to be torn down. But most of the churches up for sale have been reasonably well maintained, Walsh said, although there may be a leaky roof here or there.

In almost all cases, all of the buildings associated with each parish are on the market, including rectories, though in some cases the rectories are not adjacent to main church buildings. In East Boston, where the St. Mary Star of the Sea church is assessed at about $1.7 million, the school associated with the parish is not being sold.

The brokerage firms selling the 16 properties are Codman Co., Meredith & Grew Inc./Oncor, Richards Barry Joyce & Partners, Cushman & Wakefield of Massachusetts Inc., and Harkins Real Estate.

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. can be reached at tpalmer@globe.com; Chris Reidy at reidy@globe.com.