Beacon Apparent Winner for Bank One Building

DENVER-Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners Inc. has agreed to buy the 25-story Bank One Building at 1125 17th St. for about $50 million, sources tell GlobeSt.com. A source familiar with the deal tells GlobeSt.com Beacon beat out Lowe Enterprises for the 490,000-sf building.

Crescent Real Estate of Fort Worth, TX also made a run for the building, but its financial partner wasn’t interested, so it backed off, according to a source. Alex McCallum, Beacon spokesman, declined comment, as did Peter Savoie, executive president of Cushman & Wakefield.

The building is part of Metropolitan Life’s 14-building portfolio that it put on the market for a total of $1 billion earlier this year.

MetLife would like to sell all of its buildings by the end of the year, although sources say it is more likely that the Bank One building will close in early 2003.

A source tells GlobeSt.com that the Bank One building likely will fetch only about $100 per sf, while MetLife was hoping to get about $120 million per sf, or about $60 million.

Beacon paid $81.6 million to Lowe Enterprises for the Park Central office building at 1515 Arapahoe St. in 2001.

“It doesn’t make any sense for Beacon to just have one property Downtown,” a source tells GlobeSt.com.