REDWOOD CITY, CA-Griffin Capital of Los Angeles has added a fourth property to its Bay Area holdings with the $24-million acquisition of the headquarters of DPR Construction. The transaction is a tenant-in-common deal in which Griffin has leased back the building to DPR.

The new Griffin acquisition is a three-story, 53,000-sf building at 1450 Veterans Blvd. Griffin bought the property from DPR's founding shareholders and leased it back in a long-term triple-net lease.

Griffin acquired the property on behalf of 27 individual TIC investors, all of whom were completing 1031 exchanges. David Rupert, chief operating officer of Griffin Capital, says that the company found the deal attractive both for the building itself and for the "diverse economy, strengthening commercial real estate markets" and other fundamentals of the Bay Area office market.

Rupert points out that the "cost and logistical constraints of new office building construction" bode well for the company's long-term ownership plans. In addition, the DPR headquarters building, with its "long-term triple-net lease to a financially strong and well-managed company is a hand-in-glove fit for our investors, who are generally risk averse and looking for stable assets," Rupert comments.

DPR's building, which it constructed in 2000, is located just west of Highway 101. Griffin Capital's other holdings in the Bay Area, which it owns with TIC investors, include a 63,273-sf building in Emeryville that is net leased long-term to Ex'Pression College for Digital Arts, the 206,614-sf Hookston Square multi-tenant office building in Pleasant Hill and the 127,246-sf Atrium flex office building in Emeryville. Griffin has acquired all four of its Bay Area assets within the past two years.

In Griffin's acquisition of the 1450 Veterans Blvd. building, Principal Commercial Funding provided a $15.5-million non-recourse, 10-year fixed-rate first mortgage loan, with Cornish & Carey Commercial representing both the seller and the lender in the transaction. The majority of the investors in the acquisition of the 1450 Veterans Blvd. building were represented by four broker-dealers: 1031 Exchange Options, Berthel Fisher, Welton Street and OMNI Brokerage.