Business

The former Embassy Suites Inner Harbor Hotel downtown will hit the auction block next month as its owner seeks to reset his financing to convert the tower into apartments. The 37-story building at 222 St. Paul Place will go to auction at 11 a.m. on Sept. 20 on the front steps of the Clarence M. Mitchell Courthouse. A $300,000 deposit is required to bid, according to Alex Cooper Auctioneers, which is heading the sale.

A kids’ shoe company started by a former Mizuno and Adidas executive recently raised $500,000 to bring its shoes to a broader audience. Baltimore County-based Jbrds has sold close to 3,600 pairs of shoes since launching its first product last summer. CEO Mike Gugat said one reason for the company’s success is that Jbrds approaches kids’ shoes differently by building them based on a child’s development.

Nearly an entire block downtown sold back to its lender for $48.4 million on Tuesday after a public auction on the courthouse steps drew a bidding war. Two bidders drove the price of the three large parcels up from the opening bid of $45.7 million during the 30-minute auction. A representative for the lender, Fannie Mae, successfully bid $48,425,000 to retain title to the properties in a bidding war against a group of investors from Chantilly, Virginia.

Baltimore-based Capital Funding Group (CFG) announced the closing of a $7.2 million HUD loan, which supported the refinancing of an existing bridge loan, executed by CFG, into a HUD loan to support a 75-bed skilled nursing facility in Ohio. The deal was closed Aug. 17 on behalf of a nationally recognized borrower.

Booz Allen Hamilton announced Tuesday it has opened a new Pax River Mission Systems Integration Facility (MSIF) in the St. Mary’s County city of California, expanding upon the firm’s specialized engineering ecosystem of resources to tackle growing client challenges across the Department of Defense (DOD). Booz Allen will celebrate the opening of this new facility with a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday.

Bird, one of the e-scooter brands found throughout Baltimore over the past year, is no longer permitted to provide rides in the city. The dockless vehicle company was axed in the Baltimore Department of Transportation’s latest round of permits, which allow two other e-scooter brands — Spin and LINK by Superpedestrian — to continue operating through June 2024.

At the height of the pandemic, the co-owners of Diamondback Brewing Co. in Locust Point signed a deal with Legends Limited, giving them a one-stop shop for distribution and a wide reach across the state. Colin Marshall and Tom Foster had experienced working with multiple distributors to sell their beers and wanted out. So, they paid half of $24,000 to exit their contract with Wantz Distributors in Hagerstown.