160 Spear St. Fetches $57M

SAN FRANCISCO-The class A, 280,000-sf office building at 160 Spear St. in San Francisco’s CBD has changed hands for $57 million ($204 per sf). Ellis Partners LLC purchased the asset from Hill Cos. LLC. The 19-story building sits on a ground lease and is 99% occupied. There are 33 years remaining on the original term of the ground lease. The lease agreement includes two 10-year extension options. Jeffrey Congdon, Zachary Siegel and Christopher Aust of Cushman & Wakefield represented the buyer and seller. None of the brokers involved was available Thursday afternoon for comment.The asking price was $61 million. A list of building tenants was not immediately available, but known lessees include the McGraw-Hill Cos., which in 2003 inked a long-term lease for 47,460 sf on the lower floors of the building, and the US General Services Administration, which is in year nine of a 10-year lease for about 30,000 sf. Last year a record 7.1 million sf of class A space traded hands in San Francisco. This year’s total will most likely eclipse that mark, according to C&W. Through the first quarter of 2005, 3.4 million sf of class A space here has sold and another five million sf is currently under contract or on the market.In late February, a 430,000-sf mixed-use portfolio further up Market Street sold for $184 million, marking the largest transaction here in five years. The acquisition includes 801 Market St., a 10-story building anchored by Old Navy’s 100,000-sf flagship retail store and topped with the 198-room Palomar Hotel, and 22 Fourth St., a 207,000-sf , 16-story office building anchored by Macy’s West, which will occupy just over 60% of the building following an expansion later this year. The properties are located adjacent to San Francisco Centre, which is undergoing a $410-million renovation and expansion by Sydney-based Westfield Holdings Ltd. The new owner is Atlanta-based Jamestown, which plans to package the asset with four others to create a new fund that, like all of its funds, will be marketed to large groups of individual German investors. The seller is Pacific Resources, a Taipei, Taiwan-based real estate investment group that had not planned on selling the building until it had a the market analyzed.Donald Polishuk of Transwestern Commercial Services, which conducted the analysis, told GlobeSt.com at that time that he recommended Pacific Place sell the property as soon as possible. Why? To take advantage of prevailing interest rates, the surplus of capital in the real estate market and the excitement surrounding San Francisco Centre to get the best return on an asset with such a stable and diverse revenue stream. The sale is not an indication of recovery in real estate, he adds, but rather an indication of the surplus capital that is out there hunting for secure real estate opportunities. It’s also an indication of Jamestown’s particular interest securing such assets in the US. Its clients, thanks to the US-German Tax Treaty, get to eschew their country’s onerous tax on income and distributions–which can run as high as 60%–in favor of the relatively paltry US tax rate.