Bentall Sells Issaquah Project for $40 Mil

Chris Aggerholm, Bentall's regional acquisitions manager, says the company has spent the last few years selling off the non-core piece of the portfolio. Bentall announced its intention to sell Sammamish Park Place in mid-January along with the six-building 560,000-sf Millennium Corporate Park in Redmond; the 196,461-sf Bentall Executive Center in Santa Ana, CA; the 284,369-sf One Pacific Plaza in Huntington Beach, CA; and the 487,404-sf 1888 Century Park East office tower in West Los Angeles.

A Schnitzer Northwest official did not make himself available for comment Thursday regarding Sammamish Park Place. The company was represented by Scott Langley, who began the transaction while still a senior broker with Cushman & Wakefield and now is the new president of Portland-based Ashforth Pacific Inc.The sole tenant in Sammamish Park Place is Microsoft, which has just a couple of years left on its lease, says Aggerholm, but seems committed to the area, having committed to occupying an 880,000 addition to Sammamish Park Place currently under development.

In January in Portland, Schnitzer Northwest LLC scooped up two low-rise office properties in the Kruse Way submarket, including the 112,000-sf 6000 Meadows building completed less than a year ago and 5800 Meadows, which is still under construction and will be turned over to the company upon completion. The $40-million purchase price works out to $200 per sf.

The money for the Kruse Way purchase came from the sale of three of the four buildings at Schnitzer's 1.5-million-sf Northcreek Technology Campus III in Bothell, WA. AT&T paid somewhere in the vicinity of $70 million for the 417,000-sf development.

In December, Schnitzer Northwest and Schnitzer Investment picked up an entire Downtown block in Bellevue near Meydenbauer Center from Tochterman Management Group for an eventual $300 million, 1.5-million sf multi-use development on the five-acre site. Real estate sources say Schnitzer paid between $28 million and $34 million for the property.

Down in Renton, WA, Schnitzer Northwest and billionaire Paul Allen' s Bellevue-based Vulcan Northwest are 50-50 partners in a proposed 500,000-sf office development at the south end of Lake Union at 415 Boren Ave. Construction on the four office buildings is scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2001, with completion dates slated for third quarter 2002, and first quarter 2003.

Back in Portland, Schnitzer is in the early planning stages for an office tower at the west end of the Morrison Bridge that could rise as high as 20 stories if height limits are maxed out. It purchased the property two years ago for $5 million.