Boy Scouts Weren’t Prepared for This : Real estate: The downturn in property prices has forced a local chapter to give up its headquarters to avert foreclosure.

Boy Scouts pledge to always do their best, whether it is learning to tie knots or helping little old ladies across the street.

But the long slump in Southern California’s commercial real estate market has now gotten the best of the West Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America, which quietly deeded back its headquarters building in Sherman Oaks last month to a lender in order to fend off foreclosure.

The West Los Angeles Council, as it is known, represents Scouts from Malibu to Lancaster. It bought the three-story building on a trendy strip of Ventura Boulevard in 1985, moving into about half the complex and renting the other half.

All went well for the first few years, as commercial property values across Southern California soared. The Scouts took out a second mortgage to tap into their fast-rising equity and pay off other debts.

But the deal turned sour around 1990, when property prices headed south and the state tumbled into recession. “All of a sudden, the building--our ‘golden goose’--turned into a lead albatross,” council official Del Hanks said.

The Scouts tried to meet their monthly obligations, he said, but by 1992, the council realized that it could not keep the building if the organization was to remain solvent.

Already more than $300,000 behind on their payments and unable to find a buyer willing to make a decent offer, the Scouts last month reluctantly deeded their interest in the property back to a unit of Weyerhaeuser Mortgage Co.

Officials at Weyerhaeuser didn’t return repeated calls, although one receptionist who answered the phone at its Woodland Hills office warned that no one there “would really want to talk about foreclosing on some little Boy Scouts.”

The Scouts, meantime, have moved into a one-story building at a Van Nuys industrial park. While Hanks says the council regrets the way their Sherman Oaks deal panned out, he notes that the debacle served to remind of key tenets in Boy Scout law.

“We’re a little more humble and thrifty now,” he said.