By Jack Stubbs
On Monday, January 28th, Newport Beach, California-based Panattoni Development Company, an international real estate developer that specializes in industrial real estate development, sold a Class A office Building in Des Moines, Washington for $14.7 million, King County records show. The buyer of the property, Des Moines Creek Business Park Phase II LLC, shares the same address as Metropolitan Life Insurance Company based in San Francisco.
Neither Panattoni nor MetLife responded to calls about the recent property sale in time for the publishing of this story.
The recorded transaction included four separate parcels, according to public documents. The first parcel, located at 2200 S. 216th St., includes a five-story, 281,805 square foot Class A office building constructed in 2018 and sitting on five acres. The three other parcels, located adjacent to the office building and listed in public documents as FAA-Northwest Mountain Regional HQ parking, comprise an approximately thirteen-acre associated parking lot.
The Des Moines Creek Business Park, located at 2141 South 211th Street, is a master-planned business park that covers 87 acres, according to Panattoni Development;’s web site. Phase III of the project consists of two distribution facilities totaling just over 502,000 square feet. Construction began on Des Moines Creek Business Park in March 2016 and was completed in March 2017.
In December 2016, Panattoni sold the first three buildings of the Des Moines Creek Business Park—which was developed on Port of Seattle-owned land just south of Sea-Tac Airport—for $68 million to Cava Des Moines Industrial LLC, which is associated with LaSalle Investment Management of Chicago, according to a press release on Panattoni’s web site.
Panattoni has been developing the 87-acre business park in three phases. The project could eventually create about 1.3 million square feet, with a total investment that The Port estimates at $100 million to $125 million.
The site of the Des Moines Creek Business Park has a long-standing history. Beginning in the 1980s, the land was gradually bought and cleared by the Port to mitigate noise complaints in a mostly residential area, and the land became vacant by the 1990s, according to Panattoni’s web site. Planning for a business park or technology center began in 2005 and the Port selected Panattoni in 2013. The developer’s ground lease also began in 2014, with a 55-year initial term and two 10-year options to extend.
Phase two of Des Moines Creek Business Park, announced in 2015, is a 300,000-square-foot regional office building for the Federal Aviation Administration, which was completed in early 2018. The FAA has an initial 20-year lease with Panattoni.
Founded in 1986, Panattoni Development Company operates from 24 offices in the United States, Canada and Europe and has developed over 320 million square feet across these offices. One of the most active private industrial developers in the U.S., the company specializes in industrial, office and build-to-suit projects.
In mid-December 2018, Panattoni sold the 467,526 square foot Lakewood-Tacoma Gateway Logistics Center to Boston-based TA Realty for $65.6 million, or approximately $140 per square foot.
