(Read more on the industrial market.)
WASHINGTON, DC-J Street Development is putting one of its NoMa assets on the block. The property at 1111 N. Capitol St. is a 174,058-sf flex-industrial building currently leased to the Smithsonian Institution through September 2008.
It is a historic building originally built in 1925 as a warehouse for the C&P Telephone Co. Today the Smithsonian uses it to build exhibits for the Mall, Elizabeth Price, president of NoMa BID, tells GlobeSt.com. J Street could not be reached by deadline.
“They are taking offers next week and could make a decision end of year or the first of next year,” Price says. According to Eastdil's marketing materials, the company in charge of brokering the sale, the architectural firm Shalom Baranes & Associates has created conceptual plans to redevelop the property into a roughly 525,000-sf, class A office building. “As part of the proposed transaction, the property will be conveyed with Transferable Development Rights sufficient to develop at this density,” it said. “In addition, the existing owner has already performed significant entitlement work on the site. The costs and time already invested in this pre-development phase can be valued at $10 to $15 per sf.”
There are not many comps on the market to which this particular structure can be compared, given its use and historic designation–and certainly none that have occurred after the credit crunch which has affected investment sales prices. One possible comp, says Tonya Ginter, director of research & marketing for GVA Advantis, is Capital Plaza I, a 12-story, 291,838-sf office building located at 1200 First St., that was purchased by Apollo Real Estate Advisors Value Enhancement Fund VI from a partnership that included Stephen A. Goldberg. It traded for $94.5 million, or $324 per sf, in the first half of the year.
Still, it is debatable whether those terms could be matched in the current environment, Ginter tells GlobeSt.com. “The investment sales market has slowed down throughout Washington, DC since the credit crunch began.”
NoMA, Capitol Hill and the Baseball District, though, may experience a mini flurry of sales as a result, she speculated. “These buildings are so much less expensive than ones in the East End and the CBD. I think more people will consider NoMA and the southeast as rents and the buildings are cheaper and the difficulty of finding financing with the credit crunch.”
Eastdil is also representing the Bristol Group on the sale of One NoMa Station, an office building that went on the market in the spring. It is currently evaluating the offers, according to Price.
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
