Trizec Drops $150M for Rest of E & Y Plaza

LOS ANGELES-A private real estate investment fund managed by Goldman, Sachs & Co has sold its 75% interest in the 41-story, 915,000-square-foot Ernst & Young Plaza in Los Angeles for $149.8 million. The buyer, making its first acquisition as a as a publicly traded U.S. office REIT, was New York-based Trizec Properties.

The property had been owned since 1997 by a joint venture comprised of Whitehall Street Real Estate Limited Partnership VII and TrizecHahn Corp., Trizec’s predecessor company.Trizec completed the acquisition through a tax-efficient reinvestment of proceeds from the recent sale of Perimeter Woods, a property located in Charlotte, NC. Goldman Sachs provided Trizec’s $120-million mortgage.

Ernst & Young Plaza anchors Downtown at the intersection of 7th and Figueroa streets. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merill, the class A office tower was completed in 1985 and includes 330,000 sf of retail space. A source at Trizec tells GlobeSt.com the office space is 90% leased and the retail occupancy rate–thanks to a lot of vacant department store space–is “a lot lower.”