Family-owned West St. Paul senior center fetches $18 million.

Byline: William Morris

A West St. Paul senior care center has sold for nearly $18 million dollars.

Southview Acres Health Care Center, at 2000 Oakdale Ave., was bought Wednesday by Fairway WSP Realty LLC for $17.9 million, according to a certificate of real estate value published the same day. The buying entity shares an address with Valley View Manor, a senior care facility in Lamberton operated by St. Louis Park-based Superior Healthcare Management.

The seller is an entity registered to a residential address in Stillwater. According to Southview Acres' website, the company is owned by the Lemieux family, which bought the building and opened a nursing home there in 1966. The building originally dates to 1933, according to CoStar Group.

Messages left for the buyer, seller and Superior Healthcare Management were not returned. An employee at Southview Acres said nobody was available Monday to comment on the sale.

Southview Acres has long traded on its reputation as a family business, said Michael Leonard, a vice president for senior housing finance at JLL, which until recently held the mortgage for the property.

"To the extent you can point to that family-owned nature, it's certainly not a bad thing," Leonard said in an interview. "From what I understand, it was a family-owned business and the owners were getting on in age and decided to get out of the business."

Southview Acres has 231 beds and offers long-term, transitional and memory care, according to its website. The sale works out to $77,489 per bed.

The site is about two blocks west of the Highway 52-Southview Boulevard interchange. Dakota County values the property at $7.4 million, according to county records.

The 4.04-acre property is just east of the Southview Country Club. Directly north is Southview Senior Living, an...