Ashforth's Lloyd District properties include Lloyd Center Tower, Liberty Centre, Lloyd 700 Building, and Oregon Square. In addition to managing the properties here, Ashforth has been focused on the city's $100-million convention headquarters hotel project. Ashforth and partner Garfield Traub were recently selected by the city to develop the eventual 600-room hotel on city-owned land across from the Oregon Convention Center, which delineates the southwest edge of the Lloyd District. In addition, Ashforth has been master planning the mixed-use redevelopment of a superblock it owns in the Lloyd District, and recently closed a $50-million private equity fund and is now out looking for the funds first investments.

"It may be our first acquisition in the core but it won't be our last," says Langley. With regard to the price paid, Langley says that due mostly to significantly higher construction costs than two years ago, the cost of building new is at or above the $300 per sf mark. That, in turn, means that tenants would have to be willing to pay $35- to $40 per sf to make it pencil. The rents at ODS Tower, by comparison, are in the mid $20s on a full service basis. That gives Ashforth room to push the rents as the market tightens while still remaining well below the asking rent of any of the new office towers now in the planing stages.

Another strategic advantage of the building is that it is one of only a handful of builidngs in this city that meets the new seismic-related construction standards that came about after the Northridge (California) earthquake. Both state and federal government agencies not already in buildings that meet the new standard are required to relocate to such buildings as their leases roll.

That requirement is what helped fill up 1201 Lloyd Boulevard, a 225,000-sf Lloyd District office bulding that was completed in 2002 but remained largely vacant until last year, when GSA leases came due at several older buildings, prompting their shift to 1201 Lloyd. It also may help keep ODS Tower full for the foreseeable future, local industry sources tell GlobeSt.com.