SILVER SPRING, MD-Locally based REIT Corporate Office Properties Trust has sold off an office/flex building here for $21.3 million. A joint venture between Finmarc Management and the Goldstar Group acquired the 228,179-square-foot building. HFF brokered the transaction.

The building, located in the Route 29 submarket of Silver Spring, was built in 1969. In 2003 it underwent some $2.3 million in capital improvements. Currently, the asset is 83% leased to Comcast, the US federal government and Holy Cross Hospital.

This has been an unusually busy month for office/flex in Silver Spring—a market that is supply-constrained in terms of this particular product and tends to attract only a niche user base as a result. At the start of the month another REIT, Beachwood, OH-based DDR, sold an office/flex portfolio for $31.1 million.

That four-building, 288,392-square-foot portfolio, called Tech Center 29, is close to COPT’s former property, which is located on 11800 Tech Rd. The buyer of the DDR portfolio was a joint venture between Bernstein Management and Spectrum Partners. Privately held Spectrum in turn is a joint venture of Kodiak Properties and Finmarc-- which partnered with Goldstar to buy the COPT asset. Finmarc  provides management services for retail, hotel, office, flex and warehouse properties.

Both COPT and DDR were likely motivated to sell these particular assets by the same reasons—the need to recycle capital as they realign their portfolios. DDR has been selling off assets not associated with its core retail play. COPT, for its part, has been selling off anything that doesn’t support its core mission of leasing to government agencies and users.

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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.