Banyan, Oaktree Capital Buy Tampa Trophy Tower for $110M

By Gail Kalinoski

Mike Davis, Vice Chairman, Cushman & Wakefield

Miami-based Banyan Street Capital and Oaktree Capital Management of Los Angeles have acquired the 38-story, 757,425-square-foot Tampa City Center, a Class A trophy office tower in downtown Tampa, Fla., for $110 million from Alliance Partners HSP.

The Cushman & Wakefield team of Vice Chairman Mike Davis, Executive Director Rick Brugge and Executive Director Michael Lerner represented Alliance Partners HSP, a Bryn Mawr, Pa.-based boutique real estate investment and operating company. Alliance Partners HSP, which acquired the building in 2014, created a land lease for the property at that time and retains ownership of the land lease, according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. The new owners will pay rent to lease the land. This was the third time Cushman & Wakefield handled a sale of the property. Davis, Brugge and Lerner also represented the previous owners in 2014.

Tampa City Center

Cushman & Wakefield Senior Director Jason Hochman, Senior Director Chris Lentz, Executive Managing Director Michael Ryan and Executive Director Brian Linnihan of the firm’s Equity, Debt & Structured Finance Group assisted the buyers in securing an $84 million loan from HSBC Bank. The loan included funding for the acquisition, as well as capital improvements and tenant improvement costs.

The new owners retained Cushman & Wakefield to continue leasing and management of the property. The leasing team is led by Managing Director Barry Hanerfeld and Senior Director Barry Oaks.

Located at 201 N. Franklin St. in the heart of Tampa’s CBD, the building is near restaurants, hotels and recreational venues including the Tampa Riverwalk and Amalie Arena. The high-rise offers views of downtown, the Hillsborough River and Tampa Bay. Recent upgrades of the LEED Gold-certified tower included improvements to the two-story lobby. The building has a convenience store, a fully-equipped conference room and a skybridge that connects to the Hilton Tampa Downtown and the city-owned Fort Brooke parking garage. The University Club, a private social club is located on the 38^th floor.

“Tampa City Center’s unmatched location and connectivity to the Hilton hotel, Fort Brooke parking garage, Starbucks and The University Club differentiates this asset from all others in the CBD,” Davis said in a prepared statement. “As demand continues to grow in downtown, this asset will provide exceptional investor returns and shall remain the location of choice for amenity-driven tenants.”

The building is 95 percent leased to tenants including Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Masonrite, Morgan & Morgan, FieldCore (a division of GE), CDW and PNC Bank.

Hot office market

Tampa’s office market has been hot over the past year, as 32,400 new jobs were added in the city for an annual growth rate of 2.3 percent. Much of that boost was driven by the financial services sector, which produced 4,900 new jobs, a 7.7 percent year-over-year increase and the highest in the state, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s Marketbeat Tampa Office Q3 2018 report. Class A overall rents were up 3.8 percent, marking the first time in the market’s history that rents averaged more than $30 per square foot. Leasing activity was also strong in the third quarter.

In September, Strategic Property Partners unveiled plans for two trophy office towers totaling nearly 1 million square feet that will be part of the $3 billion Water Street Tampa mixed-use project in downtown Tampa. The towers, 1001 Water St. and 400 Channelside, will be the first ground-up trophy office buildings constructed in the city in nearly 25 years. The 20-story 1001 Water St. tower will have about 380,000 square feet of Class A space and the 19-story 400 Channelside will have about 500,000 square feet of Class A space. SPP broke ground in 2017 on the first phase of Water Street Tampa, which will eventually have 4 million square feet of space including two hotels, 3,500 residential units, 1 million square feet of cultural and retail space and a total of 2.6 million of office space.

Banyan Street, Oaktree partnerships

Banyan Street, the owner and operator of premier office assets in major Eastern U.S. markets, and Oaktree Capital, an institutional investment advisor with offices in the U.S. and abroad, often work together. In May, an affiliate of Banyan Street and funds managed by Oaktree, sold a Class A office portfolio in Orlando, Fla., for $39.2 million to an affiliate of TerraCap Management. Located in Orlando’s Central Florida Research Park, Resource Square I and III, had a total of 244,549 square feet of space.

Images courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield