A real estate firm launched by former NBA team owner Robert Sarver to buy office buildings at depressed prices has acquired its first real estate in Seattle, a 10-story life science property just east of Seattle Center.
Sarver’s Phoenix-based 3Edgewood bought 222 Fifth, a nearly 200,000-square-foot building near the Space Needle, for $50 million from Intercontinental Real Estate, which partnered with Lincoln Property Co. to develop the building that opened in 2024.
The sale price of the mostly vacant building at 210-222 Fifth Ave. North is a fraction of the property assessed value of $172 million, according to sale documents filed with King County.
It was not immediately known whether the buyer assumed a construction loan provided the developers for the project by Citizens Bank in 2022. 3Edgewood, founded in 2023 by Sarver, a longtime real estate investor who formerly owned the Phoenix Suns, did not respond by requests to comment.
The sale of the building designed by Gensler comes as a burst of new construction aimed at catering to biotech tenants in recent years has far outweighed demand in Seattle, where the life science industry has long been a critical backbone for the office market.
The region’s vacancy rate for lab and research space was 21.2% at the end of 2025 — slightly lower than the 23% national average for the top 13 U.S. biotech markets, according to CBRE’s most recent national life science report.
A boost in life science venture capital funding in Seattle and across the country in the second half of last year could set the stage for stronger lab leasing in 2026, according to a new Cushman & Wakefield report. Despite the promising signs, U.S. life science real estate markets “remain in a prolonged reset phase,” according to the report.
Seattle-based biotech nonprofit Access to Advanced Health Institute is among several biotech tenants that have moved into coworking lab space over the past year at 222 Fifth, which remains about 84% vacant, according to CoStar data.
3Edgewood has also bought high-profile office properties in Dallas, Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles since Sarver sold the Suns and the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury basketball teams at the end of 2022 for about $4 billion.