Like a skilled Monopoly player, Chicago-based Walton Street Capital continues to trade its Seattle-area holdings, selling Park Place late last month to another Chicago real estate investment firm.
The $115.8 million price paid by Trans-western Investment Co. LLC makes the Park Place office building trade one of Seattle's priciest transactions, just like Park Place in the board game.
Built in 1972 and renovated in 2004, the 21-story, 310,633-square-foot office building is located at 1200 Sixth Ave. According to OfficeSpace.com, about 68,000 square feet in the office building is available for lease, implying a 78 percent occupancy rate.
Walton acquired the Park Place building last year for $82 million, or $264 a square foot, as part of its $345 million purchase of an office portfolio from Seattle's Benaroya Cos. Walton still owns the three office buildings in the Metropolitan Park complex near Interstate 5.
Buyer Transwestern is also providing the financial backing for The Landing, a $390 million mixed-used project in Renton that Dallas-based Harvest Partners is constructing on former Boeing property.
The privately held Chicago real estate investment and services firm has approximately $9.8 billion invested in more than 400 properties on behalf of U.S. and Asian investors.
Transwestern has been active in the Puget Sound area in recent years, purchasing the 24-story Skyline Tower, in Bellevue, in 2004 and selling it last year. The firm also provided mezzanine financing for Kent's CenterPoint Corporate Park. The weak dollar is helping spark Asian investors interest in Puget Sound area properties.
The Park Place sale caps a string of recent transactions by Walton Street. In June, the Chicago real estate investment firm paid $254 million to buy six industrial properties in Woodinville, Tukwila and Kent from CalWest Industrial Holdings LLC. The purchases were part of a larger $2.8 billion industrial portfolio sale that included 95 properties along the West Coast and in Phoenix and Dallas.
In April, Walton paid Samis Foundation $47 million for Smith Tower and the adjacent Florence Building.
The firm tends to be a short-term holder of properties, as evidenced by its recent sales of two other Seattle office properties.
Walton bought the historic 22-story Exchange Building, at Second Avenue and Marion Street, for $25.5 million in March 1998 and sold it in February 2005 to Texas-based Crescent Real Estate Equities for $52.4 million.
Within months of its purchase of the Exchange Building in 1998, the fund bought the Union Bank of California Center, at Fourth Avenue and Madison Street, out of a bankruptcy proceeding for $62.5 million. In mid-2004, Walton sold the 41-story skyscraper for $100.7 million to a partnership that paired Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners Inc. LLC with developer Greg Smith of Seattle-based Urban Visions.
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source: bizjournals.com
