A buyer appears to have been found for the former Shopko Hometown building on the west side of Powell, but their identity and intentions remain a mystery for now.

The local Shopko closed in mid-June as part of the collapse of the entire chain of stores. A New York City-based real estate firm has been marketing the building and land off U.S. Highway 14-A for a few months.

A document on the Raider Hill Advisors website, updated last week, says there’s a “sale pending” for the Powell property. Patrick Brady, vice president of leasing at Raider Hill, declined to answer questions about the pending sale, including when the deal might close and who’s planning to buy it.

Powell Economic Partnership Executive Director Christine Bekes said Tuesday that she knows “there is serious interest” in the former Shopko, but didn’t have any specifics.

While the building has been used as a retail store since its construction in 1985 — first as a Pamida, then as a Shopko — a new buyer could presumably find any number of uses for the property or hold it as an investment.

Shopko filed for bankruptcy protection in January, citing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and difficulty competing with online and larger retailers. Company leaders initially hoped to only close some of the roughly 370 stores while continuing to operate the more profitable ones in places like Powell. However, investors ultimately were uninterested in providing funding for “New Shopko” and the entire chain was shuttered by mid-June.

Shopko remains in bankruptcy court while various creditors battle over its remaining assets, but the property in Powell was never part of that case, as it was never owned by Shopko. The building and land were instead owned by an entity called Spirit MTA REIT (SMTA), which held several other Shopkos. In March, SMTA leaders opted to sell 79 former Shopko properties — including Powell’s — to a group led by a New York-based private investment firm called Monarch Alternative Capital LP.

Monarch then tabbed Raider Hill Advisors to oversee the sale and leasing of the 79 newly acquired properties, which contain a total of 5.5 million square feet of building space across 14 states. They’re being jointly marketed as “Heartland Hill Properties.”

As of July 22, Raider Hill Advisors’ website said sales were pending for 10 of the properties, including those in Powell and Lander.

No price is listed on Raider Hill’s site for the Powell store, which includes 28,500 square feet of leasable space on a 3.93 acre parcel of land. The Park County Assessor’s Office has pegged the property’s market value at $606,615, but that’s just a rough estimate.