The remaining Puget Sound assets located in Redmond and Seattle, which were part of Hines’ seven-building West Coast office sale to Blackstone, closed this week for a total of $297 million. The Houston-based real estate investment and holding company has been on a selling spree in 2016, liquidating a number of properties across the country.
So far in 2016, Hines REIT has sold 22 of its directly owned properties for $2.3 billion, before transaction costs and retirement of debt. In addition, during that same time period, the Hines US Core Office Fund LP, in which Hines REIT owns a 28.8 percent LP interest, sold four of its properties for $762.7 million, before transaction costs and retirement of debt. Hines REIT is in the process of liquidating the few remaining assets it owns directly and through its interest in Hines US Core Office Fund LP and currently anticipates those sales will be completed before year-end.
In July of 2016, Hines announced that it would sell seven West Coast office assets located in Puget Sound, the Bay Area and Southern California in a cash transaction worth $1.162 billion to an affiliate of Blackstone Real Estate Partners VIII. The Redmond and Seattle buildings were part of this Blackstone purchase.
On Wednesday, the Daytona-Laguna buildings in Redmond, which are home to Honeywell and Microsoft; and 5th and Bell building in Seattle, which is occupied by Amazon, closed as well.
The Daytona-Laguna complex sold for just over $203 million, for the nine-building, 715,000-square-foot development. On a combined square foot basis, that price comes to roughly $284.
The 5th & Bell property closed for $92.9 million, or roughly $486 per square foot. The six-story building has almost 200,000 rentable square feet. It is located in Seattle’s Belltown/Denny Regrade neighborhood, and one of its tenants is Amazon.
Earlier this week, Hines also closed on Bellevue’s Civica Office Commons towers, a two-building, 323,562 square foot Class A office complex in the heart of the Eastside city. That transaction, which was not part of the same REIT as the Redmond and Seattle buildings, closed for $192.9 million, or just over $596 per square foot, according to public records. The buyer was a joint venture of Unico Properties and Boston, Mass.-based AEW Capital Management.
