Private equity firm KingSett Capital bought two office buildings next to downtown Vancouver’s largest shopping mall in a sale that could set a pricing benchmark and clear the way for more office deals in the region.
Toronto-based KingSett bought the twin office buildings at 700 and 750 W. Pender St. totaling 283,530 square feet from Cadillac Fairview for $125 million, according to multiple people familiar with the deal.
German commercial bank Landesbank Baden-Württemberg provided a $112 million loan to KingSett for the purchase of the buildings in a share-sale transaction, according to loan documents.
The deal is another sign that investment activity is picking up across the board in greater Vancouver, North America’s tightest big-city office market with a vacancy rate of 8.2%.
While newer trophy offices have traded for a higher price — such as Deka Immobilien’s $280 million purchase of 401 W. Georgia and 402 Dunsmuir St. last year — the latest sale “is one of the most significant office transactions since the start of the pandemic for Vancouver’s downtown core,” said Paul Richter, CoStar’s director of market analytics in western Canada.
The properties sold for a price short of their combined assessed value of $146.2 million, but the deal shows that investors are also interested in buying older downtown Class B offices, despite average vacancy rates that are up to 6 percentage points higher than top-tier buildings, Richter said.
More deals to come
The buildings sold for less than $450 per square foot — just over half the per-square-foot price average four years ago — in a sign that buyers and sellers are agreeing on pricing for older office stock as well as the highest-quality office properties.
That could mean more big transactions are in the offing, Richter said.
“This transaction sets the price mark for a full 30% of the office buildings downtown, and could result in more transactions if vendors are comfortable with this now-defined price correction,” he said.
The 16-storey 700 W. Pender was built in 1973, and its twin at 750 W. Pender opened three years later, according to CoStar data. The buildings are across from CF Pacific Centre, a mostly underground 700,000-plus-square-foot mall with more than 100 stores that’s also owned by Cadillac Fairview.
Tenants at the buildings include timber giant Mercer International, Copper Mountain Mining and dozens of other firms across the mining, construction, manufacturing, tech and other sectors.
Cadillac Fairview, the Toronto-based real estate subsidiary of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, put the towers on the market early this year. The combined occupancy of the buildings, which fill the entire block between Howe and Granville streets, is 86%, according to marketing materials from JLL, which listed the properties for sale.
For the record
Edgar Buksevics, Kevin Meikle and Mark Trepp of JLL are the listing brokers for the sale.