Vacant Bank One Building Gets New Owner, New Tenant

PHOENIX-The freshly sold 72,355-sf Northern Corporate Center, vacant for nearly two months, has snagged a 38,000-sf tenant practically as soon as the ink dried on the acquisition papers. Northern Corporate LLC, headed by Doug Dragoo, president of Paragon Properties Ltd., paid $5.95 million for the class A property.

Dragoo tells GlobeSt.com that Health Services Advisory Group will move into the building in May, shortly after renovations wrap up. “It’s a very well located office building. It’s a great location, great building,” he says. “It just needs a little tender loving care.” That care is coming in the form of new landscaping, new facade and a lobby makeover. The two-story office building is being retrofitted for multi-tenant use.

Trammell Crow Co.’s Barry Gabel, principal, and Mindy North, senior vice president, represented the seller, Bank One Arizona NA in the disposition, part of the nationwide unloading of surplus property associated with the Nations Bank merger. Gabel says the Phoenix team has a couple other properties on Bank One’s “to go” list. But Northern Corporate Center, located at 1600 E. Northern Ave., was the premier building in the lot.

Bank One Arizona used the structure for its credit card servicing facility. That division moved into another Bank One location in Phoenix some 45 to 60 days ago. “They didn’t have a need for that building any longer,” says Gabel.

Gabel says several prospective buyers stepped forward. But, Bank One was particularly taken with the buying entity’s “pricing, ability to close the transaction and the amount of real estate owned in Phoenix and the US,” he explains. Dragoo’s Phoenix-based Paragon Properties owns a mixed-use portfolio that spans Utah, Colorado and Nevada as well as its home state. Jeff Wentworth of Grubb & Ellis Co.’s Phoenix office represented the buyer in the transaction.

Northern Corporate Center is located in Central Phoenix about half mile southwest of Squaw Peak Freeway or as the locals prefer to call it, “The 51.” It fronts Northern Avenue and is flanked by commercial, retail and single-family developments.