Office Building Trades for $10M

The buyer was 242 Walton Partners LLC, a private investment group led by Birger Brinck-Lund He is a Summit-based businessman who also heads New Enterprise Development, a new business consulting firm. The seller was a trio of joint venture partners, including the New York City-based Geometry Realty, Bergman Real Estate of Iselin, NJ and Grand Realty Group of Summit.

"The opportunity was highly contested, given the favorable assumable financing and the value-added nature of the property," says John Hoffman of the Grubb & Ellis Metro New York Institutional Investment Team, who co-brokered the deal with G&E colleagues Matthew Schnurr and Michael Harrington. Details of the financing were not released.

The value-added nature of the buy, meanwhile, involves the roughly 14,000 sf of space currently available in the building, listed on Bergman Real Estate's website at the time of sale with an asking price of $18.50 per sf plus tenant electric. Also part of the value-add is an adjacent undeveloped parcel of land.

"Grubb & Ellis scoured the market to locate multiple 1031 exchange buyers who aggressively bid on our property," says John Popolillo, vice president at Geometry. "We were pleased with the crisp execution of this transaction."

The 87%-occupied building is home to such tenants as Qualcare Inc., Kelly Services, Modis, Ocean World Shipping, Crystal Mortgage and OpenMetrik. Qualcare, a provider-sponsored management healthcare group, at one time had a much larger presence in the building, using it as its headquarters. But as reported by Globe St.com, last year Qualcaresigned a lease for 100,000 sf at a nearby Mack-Cali Realty building and has moved most of its headquarters operations there.