GlobeSt.com UPDATE: CBRE Wins Back Leasing Work for Naito Flagship

PORTLAND, OR-CB Richard Ellis has won back the leasing assignment for Montgomery Park, the biggest egg in the Bill Naito Co’s commercial real estate basket. The nine-story, 750,000-sf office building in the northwestern corner of the city is 25% vacant, which means the team has about 185,000 sf to fill.CBRE resigned from the account in April following a division of the Naito family’s assets and had to compete with several other brokerage firms to win it back. The assets were previously held by H. Naito Corp., owned by various members of the Naito family, but a falling out prompted litigation that resulted in January settlement agreement that divided H. Naito Corp. assets between two shareholder groups. Sam Naito and his son Verne got the H. Naito Corp. name and the family’s Made in Oregon chain of retail stores. All but two of the real estate assets went to the children of the late Bill Naito (Sam’s brother) and Sam Naito’s two oldest sons (Ron and Larry), who sided with the Bill Naito children in the dispute. They created Bill Naito Co. as the new owner of the portfolio, which also includes the 140,000-sf Galleria retail and office building at 921 SW Morrison St. in Downtown Portland and the 120,800-sf Albers Mill Building on Northwest Naito Parkway. The Bill Naito family formed Bill Naito Co. to hold the portfolio and in May hired locally based Elliott Associates to handle the day-to-day asset management. That responsibility includes hiring leasing brokers for the various buildings and overseeing the Bill Naito Co. employees who handle the day-to-day property management duties. Montgomery Park represents about two-thirds of Bill Naito Co.’s total real estate portfolio. Located at 2701 NW Vaughan, it was built in 1909 and last renovated in 1988. The CBRE leasing team is Trevor Kafoury, Tom Fellman and Josh Schweitz. Elliott Associates president Lou Elliott says he chose CBRE because of it had a previous history with the property “and demonstrated the right mix of energy and creativity needed” to lease it up. The assignment comes with high expectations. “Right now, the building has a 75 percent occupancy rate,” says Elliott. “We feel confident that we can raise that to 90 percent or better in the next six months.”The vacancy includes the entire sixth floor, which totals 80,000 sf. There are two other larger vacancies in the building, a 23,480-sf space on the 3rd floor and a 22,236-sf space on the 4th floor. Beyond that, there are eight vacancies between 1,000 sf and 13,000 sf and 14 that have less than 1,000 sf. Gross annualized asking rates range from $10 per sf to $18 per sf.