Rose Hill to be offered in foreclosure sale | Aiken Standard

A Winter Colony estate will go on sale July 1 at the Aiken County Courthouse.

Rose Hill is among the bids in the foreclosure auction scheduled for 11 a.m.

The Greenville Street estate is for sale due to a foreclosure proceeding filed by Niki Inc., whose registered agent is Ketan Patel, against ALESCCA LLC and Elizabeth Smith.

The amount of the judgment is $2,658,986.43.

In August 2020, Smith and her then-fiancé, Andrew Hobbs, purchased Rose Hill on behalf of ALESCCA for $1.375 million from Niki Inc.

Smith and Hobbs later married.

“It was owner-financed; I wanted to make sure they did a good job and were successful,” Patel said of the deal during an interview in Rose Hill on June 24. “They’ve only made maybe one or two payments in four years. I tried to give them a lot of chances.

The Aiken Standard called David Edward Belding, Smith and ALESCCA’s attorney, and left a voicemail, but it was not returned by the deadline for this article to publish.

Under the management of Niki Inc., Rose Hill was an event center. Catering and overnight accommodations were also available.

“It was a successful business,” Patel said. “The reason I sold it at the time was that I was the only one in my family who could take care of it. If something was wrong with me, my two daughters weren’t interested.”

Rose Hill may not find a buyer when the property is auctioned, and if that turns out to be the case, “I’ll definitely manage it for a while, making sure everything’s okay,” Patel said. “Everything will be restored. That’s why I have already started cleaning (the property) at my own expense.

“And the next time I sell to someone, I’ll make sure they can handle this thing. No one can give me money, and then we have the same problem.

The Aiken Standard reported in June 2022 that Elizabeth and Andrew Hobbs were trying to sell Rose Hill, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.