Premier Office Centers Opens Shop in Seattle

SEATTLE-Premier Office Centers LLC has taken down a full floor of class A office space in Downtown Seattle for one of its Premier Business Centers. The Irvine, CA-based Bascom Group subsidiary will occupy 16,509-sf at Clise Properties’ 1700 Seventh Avenue. Premier Office Centers is subleasing the 21st floor space from Merrill Lynch. About 400,000 sf of the 540,000-sf 24-story building houses the headquarters of Nordstrom Inc. Vacancy in the building is less than 2%. Premier signed a seven-year lease, which is equal to the remaining term of Clise Properties’ lease agreement with Merrill Lynch, which was signed at the top of the market. Premier Business Centers’ chief executive Jeffrey Reinstein tells GlobeSt.com they got “a market deal” for “very heavily improved, very high quality space.” The going rate in Downtown Seattle for class A office space is in the mid-to-upper $20s per sf per year.While not revealing the exact lease rate on the deal, Premier Business Centers did aggregate its value with that of another it signed for 10,882 sf at 520 Broadway in Santa Monica, CA, where class A rates average about $33 per sf per year. The value of both leases is $6.6 million, it said in a Monday announcement.For Premier Business Centers, the lease represents its first executive suite option in Downtown Seattle. It has three other facilities in the metro area, but all three on the east side of Lake Washington in the cities of Bellevue, Redmond and Bothell. Reinstein says both locations are in response to “a substantial number of inquiries from our customers needing space in Downtown Santa Monica and Seattle.”"We felt (1700 Seventh Ave,) was, if not the nicest, one of the top five in Downtown Seattle,” he tells GlobeSt.com. As well, he says the building is near the new federal courthouse, which is good because many of its customers are attorneys, “and all of our competitors are on the other side of the city.”Reinstein hopes to have the 54 suites leased up within six months. A month into the marketing effort, about 10% of the suites have been leased, he says. Asking rents range from $1,500 a month, for 250- to 300-sf corner suite with a water view, to $500 a month for a smaller office with a city view.The two new Premier Business Centers bring the company’s totals to 2,600 office suites in 38 business centers in 29 cities, says Reinstein. The company has more than quadrupled in size in the past three years without taking on any debt and is now the second largest executive suites operator in the world, he says. Newport Beach, CA-based Bob Rush of U.S. Realty Group represented Premier Business Centers in the Seattle transaction. Chris Reid of Colliers International represented Merrill Lynch.