Brookfield Defaults on Two Los Angeles Office Towers, $784M in Loans

Canadian real estate giant Brookfield has defaulted on $784M in loans for two high-profile Downtown Los Angeles office towers, including $465M owed on the Gas Company Tower and $319M in loans for 777 South Figueroa St., also known as the 777 Tower.

“An event of default has occurred [and] lenders may exercise their remedies,” Brookfield’s DTLA Fund Office Trust Investor said in an SEC filing on Friday, adding that remedies may include foreclosure.

Brookfield said in the filing it has not exercised any option to extend the maturity date on the loans, which came due on Feb. 9.

The company’s DTLA REIT, formed in 2013 after Brookfield’s $2B acquisition of office tower owner MPG Office Trust, has been considered a bellwether for the DTLA office market in the past 10 years. The fund owns nearly 8M SF of DTLA office space.

Brookfield’s DTLA office fund warned in a November SEC filing that it was running out of cash and might start missing loan payments.

The financial package in default on the 52-story Gas Company Tower, located at 555 West 5^th Street, includes a two-year, floating rate $350M mortgage provided by Citi Real Estate Funding and Morgan Stanley, a $65M mezzanine loan and a $50M junior mezzanine loan. The mezzanine loans were provided by Principal Financial Group.

The financing that came due on 777 South Figueroa—also a 52-story tower—includes a $269M mortgage provided by Wells Fargo and a $50M mezzanine loan.

In a Nov. 10 filing with the SEC, Brookfield’s fund said it was in compliance with all of its loan agreements as of Sept. 30, but declining cash flows, net operating income—and the declining value of the office towers—were putting it on the precipice of foreclosures.

Brookfield reported in November that the fund had about $2.3B of total consolidated debt as of Sept. 30 and said in its filing that its “substantial indebtedness” required the fund to use “a material portion of our cash flow to service interest on the debt.

Including the two 52-story DTLA towers, the Brookfield fund’s office portfolio in DTLA totaled nearly 8M SF, including the 1.4M SF Bank of America Plaza.

The default is the third involving DTLA “trophy” office towers in the past three weeks: Oaktree initiated a foreclosure on its equity stake in Coretrust Capital Partners’ 48-story DTLA tower at 444 South Flower Street, a building made famous as the fictional HQ in the hit 1990s television show L.A. Law.

Coretrust’s $65M mezzanine loan from Oaktree—with an interest rate of nearly 9%—initially came due in December 2021, but Oaktree and Coretrust reached a forbearance agreement that extended the loan until the middle of last year.