Bergman Gains $7M Loan for 115,250-SF Office

Richard Koch, SVP and senior director for the northern New Jersey office of Northmarq, says the venture bought the property for $7.3 million, and plans a more than $1 million redevelopment of tenant spaces in the building. He tells GlobeSt.com that the now-90% occupied property was very hard to put a price on the building because of the pending lease. "There's a huge local office vacancy, it's at about 20% to 25%, it's hard to value a substantially-leased building in a market like this," Koch says.

Most of the office buildings in the Columbus market have vacancies, including a major million-sf vacancy downtown, Koch says. "We can't say it's just that property that's the elephant to ignore, however, there's vacancies throughout that market," Koch says. He says he doesn't remember where the million sf is vacant, though he could be referring to the 1.1 million sf of new space that's expected in the market, that includes the 750,000-sf Lazarus project in the Lower Downtown submarket.

The Columbus office market consists of over 39 million square feet of rentable office space and includes roughly 540 class A, B and C buildings of 20,000 square feet or larger. A first quarter market report by Grubb & Ellis put the vacancy rate of the CBD at closer to 12%, and the overall rate at about 15%. A similar CB Richard Ellis report put the vacancy rate downtown at 15%.