Jacksonville Office Asset Lands $20M Refi

10201 Centurion Parkway. Image courtesy of JLL Capital Markets

Taurus Investment Holdings’ One Deerwood office property in Jacksonville, Fla., has landed a $20.1 million refinancing. JLL Capital Markets arranged the three-year, floating-rate bridge loan with Prime Finance.

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The six-story building offers 161,167 square feet of Class A office space in Jacksonville’s Butler/Baymeadows market. Taurus purchased the property for $24.8 million in 2007, according to public records, and the building was later renovated in 2017. Located at 10201 Centurion Parkway, the office space was 88 percent leased at the time of sale. The property is situated near the J Turner Butler Boulevard/Route 202 and Southside Boulevard.

JLL’s Capital Markets team representing Taurus included Porter Terry and Tarik Bateh, senior directors. Bateh said in prepared remarks that the transaction was completed in an extremely challenging environment, but that both the borrower and lender were reliable companies.

Elsewhere in Florida, Taurus also acquired a 246,941-square-foot office complex in Sarasota for $45 million. More recently, the private equity firm was involved in one of Chicago’s largest transactions of 2020 by purchasing a 28-property industrial portfolio in March for $153.5 million.

Strong start hampered by COVID-19

While the market is facing a challenging environment as Bateh said, Jacksonville’s office market was showing a promising start to 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. According to JLL’s first quarter report on Jacksonville’s office market, tenant demand in suburban areas remained strong, while the downtown office market saw some decline.

No new developments broke ground in the market, but the pricing throughout remained on an upward trajectory. Specifically, in the Butler/Baymeadows market—where One Deerwood is located—average asking rents were $22.34 per square foot, while the vacancy rate was 15.6 percent.

Despite the metro’s solid fundamentals going into the first quarter of 2020, Jacksonville’s office market will likely be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic for the remainder of the year, according to the report. There will likely be an increase in the number of subleases available, and the development pipeline will be put on pause for the next six months. The market could see even more volatility, depending on the recession’s lasting impact after the pandemic.