NEW YORK CITY—Lexington Realty Trust said Friday it had closed on the sale of two office properties, one in Chicago and the other in the Orange County, CA city of Brea, for combined gross proceeds of $144.2 million. The locally based net lease REIT did not identify the assets by address or disclose the identities of the buyers.

However, industry data indicate that the properties in question were 275 S. Valencia Ave. in Brea, which fetched the $110-million price cited by LXP, or $173 per square foot; and the FCB Building at 101 East Erie St. in Chicago. Industry reports indicate unconfirmed sales prices of either $33 million or $35 million, or about $145 per square foot, on the Chicago asset.

The 637,503-square-foot Brea property sold to a joint venture of Irvine, CA-based Greenlaw Partners LLC and New York City-based Cerberus Capital Management in a deal brokered by Cushman & Wakefield, according to industry data. The three-story, two-building property is net leased to Bank of America through 2023, and LXP acquired it in April 2005 for $121.1 million as part of a portfolio buy from Wells REIT.

About five months earlier, in November 2004, LXP paid $49.7 million to buy 101 East Erie, according to published reports. The REIT said Friday that it had sold a Chicago office property for $34.2 million and satisfied mortgage debt of $29.9 million on the asset; LXP's most recent quarterly SEC filing indicated that amount of outstanding debt on 101 East Erie.

A Colliers International third-quarter report on the Chicago CBD's office market cited a sales price of $35 million on 103 East Erie, and identified the buyers as a group led by Laurence Geller, former CEO of Strategic Hotels & Resorts. Crain's Chicago Business reported this past January that Geller had agreed to buy the 20-story, 230,704-square-foot property from LXP for about $33 million, and was debating whether to convert it to a hotel. Its anchor tenant, advertising agency Draft FCB, had already committed to office space elsewhere in Chicago.

LXP CEO T. Wilson Eglin said Friday that the two sales brought the REIT's disposition volume to “approximately $259 million year to date, including approximately $202 million of office properties from Lexington's short-term lease and multi-tenant portfolios. These dispositions further our capital recycling and portfolio strategy, extending our average lease term, reducing capital expenditures and adding to our considerable cash balances.”

Although LXP counted additional dispositions totaling $52.6 million among the factors contributing to strong Q3 results, it has also been in acquisition mode recently. The company will pay $155 million for an industrial facility in Richland, WA upon its completion a year from now, and during Q3 it paid a total of $49.5 million to acquire a development parcel in New York City and a rehab hospital in Vineland, NJ. “The addition of long-term net-leased properties to our portfolio continues to lengthen our weighted-average lease term and improve our prospects for growth in net operating income going forward,” Eglin said when quarterly results were posted in early November.