Washington, July 19: The Watergate Hotel lost its lustre years ago, its marble floors, rich colours and grand interiors dusted over with age. Its 251 rooms have stood empty since 2007, and for a year its debt-ridden owners have been trying to unload it. On Tuesday, the American landmark may find its suitor.

The bank holding the $40 million loan is putting the foreclosed property up for auction, and in real estate circles, the much-anticipated sale is flooding the phones and email inboxes of a district auction house.

A luxury hotel chain from West Asia may be interested. A big-time developer who built the Georgetown waterfront complex definitely is. So is a hotel company from London, not to mention dozens of other would-be owners.

The prospect of a new owner promises to return one of the US’s most famous pieces of real estate to prominence.

Opening bids start at $1 million at Alex Cooper Auctioneers’s Wisconsin Avenue offices.

Many in Washington consider it a trophy property no matter what.

But some facts might give pause to anyone thinking about snapping up the empty 12-storey hotel across from the Kennedy Center where the Watergate burglars slept before they broke into the adjoining office complex in 1972, setting off the scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon.

It has been neglected for years and needs $100 million in renovations just to make it habitable, developers familiar with the Watergate said.

Monument Reality, which bought it for $45 million in 2004, has not paid the hotel’s property taxes since last year, which translates to at least $250,000 the city will collect at a sale.

Even as a vacant building, the tab for security, electricity, heat, emergency systems, insurance and other expenses comes to $100,000 to $150,000 a month.