A 155-year-old office building standing between the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards is headed back to the auction block, with bidding opening Monday for 300 W. Pratt St., better known as the Wilkens Building. The opening bid is set at $400,000, and it marks the second time in two years that the historic property has gone up for sale.
Bidding on the Wilkens Building will open October 19 on the Ten-X digital auction platform, according to WBAL-TV. Anyone looking to bid needs an online Ten-X account to participate. The auction covers 51,457 square feet of office space spread across the building's second through fifth floors, while the street-level retail portions are excluded from the sale.
The five-story structure, built in 1871 and renovated in 1990, sits uniquely between the Inner Harbor's Harborplace and Oriole Park at Camden Yards, according to marketing materials from platform.reverecre.com. It also includes 36 surface parking spaces. The building's ground floor is home to Chipotle, Dunkin' and Luna Del Sea, the listing notes, and the retail portion is described as fully occupied even as the office floors face vacancies.
Conflicting Occupancy Figures
Exactly how full the Wilkens Building's office space is depends on who's counting. WBAL-TV reported the building is leased at 43%, while Revere's marketing materials say 32% of the office space is available for lease-up, implying 68% occupancy on that basis. The two figures weren't reconciled in either source, and it's unclear what measurement dates or definitions produced the gap.
The office tenant roster listed in the marketing materials includes the General Services Administration through July 2032 and the Maryland Development Center through June 2029, alongside ten smaller boutique office tenants, per the same listing. The property's lease rollover is staggered across those years, running from 2024 through 2032. Marketing materials also point to Oriole Park at Camden Yards' 30-year lease extension, signed in 2023, as a selling point for the building's location.
A Downtown Office Market Under Pressure
The Wilkens Building's return to auction comes as downtown Baltimore's office sector continues to struggle. Baltimore's nearly 27 million square feet of office space posted a 21% vacancy rate and 85,000 square feet of negative absorption in the second quarter of 2026, according to CREDA Maryland. The city's downtown core, Baltimore City Center, fared even worse, with a 28.2% vacancy rate over the same period.
Demand has specifically dropped off for downtown Class A and Class B office buildings, the trade group reports, and commercial office prices nationwide have fallen an estimated 30% to 80% as buildings have emptied out. In response, Baltimore City has rolled out programs including Downtown Baltimore Rise and PILOT to try to jump-start stalled projects, and master residential leases at three Baltimore developments are expected to bring in more than 1,000 upper-class and graduate students from Coppin State and Morgan State University.
Other Downtown Buildings Have Gone This Route
The Wilkens Building isn't the only downtown Baltimore property to test the auction market recently. The former Daily Record building, a 14,560-square-foot structure built in 1900 that once served as a newspaper headquarters, headed to auction in January after its owner had been trying to sell it since at least 2024, according to the Baltimore Business Journal. And in January 2024, the 10-story office tower at One E. Pratt St. sold at a foreclosure auction for $25 million after its price dropped $5 million below the opening bid, per the Baltimore Business Journal and Bisnow.
Smaller deals have also been moving through the Baltimore-area market this fall. A 16,875-square-foot commercial office building in Parkville sold for $2.2 million in September, according to The Baltimore Sun, while the Lake Falls Professional Center sold for $5 million around the same time, per the Maryland Daily Record. Whether the Wilkens Building draws similar interest when bidding opens Monday remains to be seen.
