The pending closure of the Toys R Us store on Oleander Drive in Wilmington could open up a highly marketable piece of real estate, if the property is eventually put up for sale, local brokers said Thursday.

The embattled toy store chain, which filed for bankruptcy last year, announced Thursday that it is seeking approval from bankruptcy court to wind down all of its U.S. business and liquidate the inventory in all 735 of the company’s stores in the U.S. 

That doesn't mean the Wilmington property automatically will be placed on the market. 

The store at 4510 Oleander Drive is owned by TRU RE I LLC, a limited liability company with a principal office mailing address of One Geoffrey Way in Wayne, New Jersey, according to New Hanover County property tax records and documents filed with the state of North Carolina. That's the same address as the headquarters of Toys R Us.

According to local tax records, the Wilmington Toys R Us property has a total tax value of nearly $3.2 million, contains about 43,500 square feet of space and was built in 1988.

Any property on the market in that part of the city, especially around the Oleander Drive and South College Road intersection near the Toys R Us store, is likely to draw a lot of interest, said Steve Hall, a partner in Wilmington-based commercial real estate firm Maus, Warwick, Matthews & Co.

“It’s in a great location, at one of the busiest intersections in Wilmington, and I’m sure they’ll quickly find another box-user to come in and take over that space, without a shadow of a doubt,” Hall said.

As of Thursday, a potential sell off of any property owned by the toy chain was not certain. In the announcement, Toys R Us officials said that in conjunction with the firm's sale process for some of its international operations, including a motion related to bidding procedures for its Canadian stores, the company is "engaged in discussions with certain interested parties for a transaction that could combine up to 200 of the top performing U.S. stores with its Canadian operations."

It wasn't online shopping that caused the toy store company's woes, according to news reports this week, but rather the accumulation of a massive amount of debt. According to a Washington Post article Wednesday, the Toys R Us bankruptcy filing last year showed $7.9 billion in debt against $6.6 billion in assets.

It was not clear Thursday when a sale might take place at the Wilmington store or elsewhere. The company's release stated, “Toys ‘R’ Us will provide more details about the plans for the liquidation of its U.S. stores and going out of business sales in the near term."