Never been to Ayr I assume...............
Exactly - I suspect the owner over stretched then couldn't find finance to develop then ran out of money
You can ring all the alarm bells you want and serve all the enforcement notices you want. If the owner is incommunicado or the owner has gone bust there isnt much you can do until such time as the property reaches a dangerous state that requires immediate intervention via statutory or regulatory powers. You can bill the administrators but you go in the queue like the rest of the creditors and will get, if you are lucky, pennies on the pound
( also worth noting this is Scotland where they do things to a different legal framework)
From what I recall of this particular case, it was an overseas (Malaysian?) buyer, who bought the property at below-book and promised a lot.
However, a lot of the promise (as seems to happen regularly) was predilicted on getting grants and subsidies which, for whatever reason, were not forthcoming. Those injections were to be used to catalyse further investments, perhaps a few ownership flips etc., etc.
Having paid very little for the property, through a company vehicle, the owners then effectively walked away with no liability other than a book loss.
I wouldn’t be at all surpised if Network Rail has now pressed the ‘nuclear’ button in an attempt to get the now-responsible parties to get their acts together and sort out the mess.
It may also be worth remembering that this was formerly a British Transport Hotel, and therefore in a past life it would have been the railway’s own responsibility to manage, had it not been sold-off. Now, it’s not under the railway’s control, but does compromise its operation.
I don’t know what the situation in Scotland is, but in England it’s very much the case that councils can issue a compulsory purchase order, have the valuation assessed by a tribunal, take ownership and manage property on an ongoing basis. It’s not a funding issue as the purchase and redevelopment costs come out of capital reserves, not annual budgets, and many local authorities sit on some very significant reserves.
They don’t do it, however, because it’s not something that they generally seem very inclined to do, and I don’t deny that legal costs etc., have to come out of the operating budget.
Overall, though, I suspect that this situation
is quite symptomatic of the current political environment, as
@B&I perhaps suggests.