By Jon Peterson
New York City-based Blackstone has made the decision not to pursue any further the potential purchase of the 170,000 square foot office building in Seattle located at 325 Eastlake Avenue East, also known as Yale & Thomas, according to sources familiar with the transaction.
Blackstone declined to comment when contacted for this story.
The office building now is owned in a partnership between Unico Properties and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Goldman acquired a majority stake in this property as part of a sale of Unico’s Unico Partners I portfolio, a 27-building, 1.8 million square foot portfolio of assets located in Seattle and Denver. 325 Eastlake traded in January of 2019 with two other properties for a combined $116 million, and Unico did retain a portion of the ownership.
Unico chose not to comment at this time.
Blackstone was early on as far as its potential purchase of the property, as stated by sources aware of the situation. The real estate investment firm had not placed the property under contract nor had it provided a non-refundable deposit.
According to a source, Blackstone has walked away from a number of acquisitions across the country recently. One of those has been its decision to not move forward with the planned $405 million purchase of the Uptown Station office asset in Oakland, Calif. On this transaction, Blackstone had provided a $20 million non-refundable deposit, which it decided to forfeit.
325 Eastlake had been up for sale since January of this year. The listing agent on the sale was Eastdil Secured.
Most of the office building is leased to Amazon. This company had signed a 10-year lease for the property in the second quarter of 2017 for around 159,000 square feet. Unico has been the owner of the asset since 2014 when it paid $52 million for the property. It has since performed a reposition on the asset that included investing additional capital into the building. The seller at the time was Pemco Insurance, which had used the property for its headquarters.
