By Jack Stubbs
On Thursday, August 9th, Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners paid $434.8 million, or approximately $613 per square foot, to acquire the Metropolitan Park West and East buildings in downtown Seattle, according to public records filed with King County.
Beacon paid $204.4 million, or approximately $605 per square foot, for the Met Park West Building, and $230.4 million ($620 per square foot) for the Met Park East Building. Beacon acquired the buildings from the CBRE Global Investors office in Los Angeles and it did so through an entity called BCal, which is a joint venture with CalSTRS and which the company had been using for years. CalSTRS has placed a value on the joint venture with Beacon at $423 million, as of June 2017. The last commitment made to the venture by CalSTRS was $250 million in the middle of 2016.
CalSTRS holds a 95 percent ownership position in the venture with Beacon owning the other 5 percent. BCal looks to buy office buildings in many major markets across the country. The deals are mostly for core to core plus exposure.
Neither the buyer nor the seller could be reached for comment in time for the publishing of this story.
The 18-story, 337,680 square foot Met Park West Building, located at 1100 Olive Way, was built in 1980 and renovated in 2015. The property also includes 166 parking stalls. The property is part of the two-building Metropolitan Park complex, which comprises 709,108 square feet of Class A office space. The other building is the 20-story Met Park East Building, which was built in 1989 and renovated in 2015. Met Park East totals 371,428 square feet and includes 283 parking spaces.
The two-building property includes a variety of on-site amenities including bike storage, locker rooms, state-of-the-art conference room and green space and patio gathering areas. The property also features a city-wide shuttle, electric vehicle charging stations and ground-floor retail space where a Starbucks is located. The LEED Gold building, featuring approximately 20,000 square foot floor plates, also provides customizable open-office workspaces with views of downtown, South Lake Union, the Space Needle and the Olympic Mountains.
It is not entirely clear which tenants currently occupy the property. According to Google Maps, some of the current tenants include Virginia Mason Seattle Administrative Center, software company Axon, Seattle Children’s Ben Town Center for Cancer Research.
CBRE, who is in charge of the leasing and management of the Metropolitan Park Tower, did not respond to calls for comment.
Founded in 1998, Beacon Capital Partners has since its founding developed a robust operating platform to transform properties into distinct workplaces that attract current-day tenants, according to the company’s web site. Some of the company’s sold properties in Seattle include Columbia Center, 1201 Third Ave., and 909 5th Ave. The company has also previously owned properties in Bellevue including the City Center Plaza, the Eastgate Building and Key Building.
The company has been in the news in Seattle in recent months. In mid-July, a report by JLL’s Seattle office reported that the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio was in talks to purchase the 187,000 square foot Maritime Building on Seattle’s waterfront for $186 million, or approximately $997 per square foot, according to a report by Seattle’s JLL office, which reported the sale in its first quarter of 2018 market report. As of mid-July, the deal had not yet closed, but Beacon has listed the property as sold on its web site.
