UPDATE: Pitcairn Pays $251M for Chesterbrook and Glenhardie Corporate Centers

WAYNE, PA-Pitcairn Properties has closed on its acquisition of the Chesterbrook and Glenhardie corporate centers, a 17-building portfolio of class A office properties, aggregating nearly 1.3 million sf and encompassing 170 acres. Salah Mekkawy, Pitcairn’s chairman and CEO, says the price tag, excluding closing costs, is $251 million, or almost $198 per sf, and tells GlobeSt.com his company will invest between $5 million and $10 million in capital improvements.

Pitcairn partnered with Frankfurt, Germany-based SEB Immobilien-Investment GmbH, in the acquisition. This is Pitcairn’s first JV with the open-ended real estate fund, but possibly not its last. Mekkawy says the partnership plans more acquisitions “on the East Coast.” He declined to disclose each entity’s proportion of ownership. Pitcairn now has a portfolio valued at $1 billion.

This transaction is the largest in the suburban Philadelphia office market since Brandywine acquired Rubenstein Co.’s 3.5-million-sf office portfolio for $600 million in September 2004. The Chesterbrook portion of the acquisition contains 13 buildings aggregating about a million sf. Glenhardie is a four-building complex of more than 250,000 sf. The portfolio is currently 82% leased. Dan Dagit, SVP in the local office of CB Richard Ellis, is handling leasing, and he tells GlobeSt.com, “the asking rates in Chesterbrook are in the mid $20s per sf, and rates in Glenhardie are in the low $20s per sf.”