The Inn on Fairbank Street, which contains four state-sanctioned affordable units, will be sold at auction in early April, barring any delay in re-locating the two remaining tenants.

Great Elms on Stow Road, which contains five affordable rentals and shares a mortgage with the Inn, may avoid foreclosure altogether.

"If the first auction [for the Inn] satisfies the bank's mortgage, it will withdraw the auction for Great Elms," Selectman Ron Ricci reported on Monday at a meeting of the town's Municipal Affordable Housing Trust.

North Middlesex Savings Bank of Ayer holds the loan.

Although bank officials affirmed Ricci's contention that it might renounce its claim on Great Elms if it recovers its loan from The Inn's April 5 sale, the loan forbearance agreement signed on Feb. 1 does not mention any exemption for Great Elms. The agreement names $260,973.48 as the total amount the bank must recover and lists April 12 as the auction date for Great Elms.

The agreement, signed by the bank, the property owners, and Harvard's Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, calls for the affordable housing trust to pay the properties' single mortgage until March (for a total of four payments) and "relocate all tenants currently residing in the Inn."

Real estate broker and Inn property manager Rhonda Sprague, who was at the Monday meeting of the affordable housing trust, said two tenants remained at The Inn but were likely to move out next month.

Further discussion of The Inn and Great Elms was confined to an executive session.

On Tuesday, Victor Normand, the spokesman for property owners Harvard Trust Non Profit Properties, echoed Ricci's statement in January that the plan was for the current owners to keep Great Elms "until the state can help us replicate the units elsewhere."

However, if all nine of the affordable units at The Inn and Great Elms are lost, the state would need to repay a $325,861 federal improvement loan taken out on the properties in the early 1990s.