Tishman Speyer Closes $250M 400 S. Hope Acquisition

Along with the sale, O'Melveny & Myers has signed a new 10-year lease for 350,000 sf at the building, one of the biggest office leases in Southern California in some time. Cushman & Wakefield brokered both the sale and the lease. Richard Plummer, David Hasbrouck and Bill Puget represented O'Melveny & Myers in the sale, with Lynn Williams and Jeff Welch representing the law firm in its new lease.

O'Melveny & Myers, which originally developed the property with Olympia & York in 1982, had been one of the longest continuous owners of a trophy building Downtown. Sources tell GlobeSt.com that the listing of the property generated multiple offers and that Tishman Speyer closed after a very short due diligence, less than two weeks.

One source describes the 400 S. Hope property, which sits on its own city block, as "one of the highest quality trophy buildings Downtown" for its Bunker Hill location and its credit tenant roster. Besides O'Melveny & Myers, tenants at 400 S. Hope, which is 94% leased, include the Capital Group, Mellon Bank and McKinsey & Co.

The building, one of the most identifiable in Downtown L.A. for its angled roof, features twice the on-site parking of most Bunker Hill office towers, with 1.2 spaces per 1,000 sf of building space. Most others on Bunker Hill have .6 of a space per 1,000 sf, with the remainder of their parking off-site.

O'Melveny & Myers owned the 400 S. Hope building on behalf of its partners' retirement fund, according to Greg Thorpe, a partner in O'Melveny & Myers' Los Angeles office and chair of the firm's building committee. The sale of the building, "gives us a unique opportunity to diversify investment of our retirement fund," Thorpe says.

The Hope Street property is the fourth Los Angeles-area acquisition in 2005 for Tishman Speyer, which will also manage the building. The other metro-area acquisitions included three Beverly Hills properties: the 300,000-sf Maple Plaza at 345 N. Maple Dr., the 130,000-sf Beverly Mercedes Place at 9242 Beverly Blvd. and the 165,000-sf 407 North Maple Dr. building.