By Gordon Anderson | gordon@rantnc.com

The Sanford Herald building has been sold, according to a deed on file at the Lee County Courthouse.

The building, which sits on a 1.4-acre lot at 208 St. Clair Court, was conveyed on Feb. 15 to Raleigh-based Mago Properties. Not much information is publicly available about Mago, but it shares an address and registered agent with Raleigh-based Punic Properties, a company which has purchased several other downtown Sanford buildings in recent years.

Herald Publisher Jeff Ayers told The Rant Thursday that the move was “no more than a change in ownership of the building.”

The Herald offices will remain here, business as usual,” he said. “We’ll just be leasing our office space from the new owner.”

The Herald has been in operation since 1930, and moved into the building on St. Clair Court in 1952, according to Lee County’s GIS map. Paxton Media Group of Kentucky purchased the paper in 1998. Paxton’s other North Carolina holdings include The High Point Enterprise, The Lexington Dispatch, The Burlington Times-News, The Kinston Free Press, and The New Bern Sun Journal, among others.