Hines Spends $160M on Seattle's Fisher Plaza, Nets New Data-Center Capabilities

December 22, 2011
By Nicholas Ziegler, News Editor

Fisher Media Services Co. has finalized the $160 million sale of Fisher Plaza, a two-building office complex in Seattle, to Hines Global REIT. Fisher Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fisher Communications Inc., as well as ABC affiliate KOMO, call the building home. Hines will assume property management responsibilities on behalf of its REIT arm.

“Over the past several years, we have strategically repositioned Fisher for the opportunities we see as a leading local media company,” Colleen Brown, president of Fisher Communications, said. “Fisher Plaza has been an asset that is not a central component of our business model.”

The disposition, however, opens the door for Hines. “We are happy to have the opportunity to invest in one of the highest quality multi-tenanted data centers in the region, with outstanding access to telecommunications providers,” Ty Bennion, vice president of Hines, said.

Completed in 2003, Fisher Plaza features two buildings, one of five stories and the other, six. It totals 293,722 square feet of office, retail, broadcast, telecommunications and data-center space, and is 96 percent leased to tenants including the former owners, Fisher Communications, which has a 12-year lease for its corporate headquarters.

Data centers have become a priority for both Hines and the market in general. The company already owns the 661,553-square-foot One Wiltshire Building in Los Angeles, which houses more than 300 telecommunications and data carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and China Telecom.

2011 saw large deals for properties that have data-center capabilities, with only 35 megawatts of capacity remaining in the Chicago area after 40 megawatts were taken in deals this year. “There is an insatiable amount of demand happening around the globe,” Bo Bond, co-lead of Jones Lang LaSalle’s data-center solutions team, said. “As speculative development commences, we will begin to see a new crop of winners and losers in the data-center arena.”