Equastone acquired AmberGlen Business Center from the Portland, OR-based real estate merchant banking firm ScanlanKemperBard Cos, whcih paid $54.82 million for the property in mid-2005. The office and R&D portfolio includes eight buildings totaling 536,501 sf. The portfolio was roughly 60% occupied at the time of sale and the acquisition also includes a land parcel with a 22,000-sf building.
This latest buy gives Equastone 700,000 sf of commercial space added in the Portland area this year. But the firm doesn't plan to hold all of it, for long. Jeff Schindler, Equastone's chief investment officer, says the company will market for sale as much as half of the portfolio immediately.
Equastone is a value-add player, and some of the properties in the portfolio don't match the firm's plans because they are already fully leased. "We will be putting some of the properties on the market in the very near term," Schindler tells GlobeSt.com. "There is no additional value [to add to these properties] in the short term. We're best at adding value, so we will peel these off."
Schindler says the firm will hold the rest of the properties for two to four years. "That's our normal hold time," he adds. In the meantime, Equastone will continue the repositioning program that SKB had in place. The rehab, which includes upgrades to lobbies, corridors and exteriors, will run in the millions, Schindler says.
The AmberGlen portfolio is located in the Sunset Corridor area of Hillsboro, OR, which is a high-tech and biotech hotbed, according to Chris Stai, Equastone's vice president of acquisitions. The area includes companies such as Intel, Planar Systems, Cascade Microtech, Genentech and SolarWorld. Stai says the area is appealing to techies because housing costs are 42% of those found in Silicon Valley.
Equastone officials see steady growth coming from the tech firms and expect it to appear from a mix of existing firms as well as companies new to the area. SolarWorld recently purchased a 422,000-sf site and Genentech's planning a facility on 75 acres. These sites are projected to boost the area by "1,250 employees and $700 million of direct investment," according to Equastone officials.
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