KKR Makes Seattle Debut With $1.2B in Office Deals

F5 Tower (center). Image courtesy of Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons

Global investment firm KKR has made its first foray into the Seattle area by closing on $1.2 billion worth of office acquisitions, including most of a downtown skyscraper and a three-building, Class A complex owned by Hines in the edge city of Bellevue, Wash.

The New York-based company, which has around $208 billion of assets under management, announced that it has snapped up the 516,000-square-foot office condominium of F5 Tower, a 43-story, glass-sheathed tower located in Seattle’s downtown business district. The fully leased office component houses the global headquarters of cloud and security services firm F5 Networks.

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The prime building, which previous owners Daniels Real Estate and Stockbridge Capital Group reportedly put up for sale in May, also contains a separate 189-key luxury hotel across the lower 13 floors. Completed in 2017, the property located at 801 5^th Ave. is the fifth tallest building in the city.

KKR has also acquired The Summit, a 915,000-square-foot Class A office complex in the central business district of Bellevue, east of Seattle. Developed by Hines, the property comprises two existing LEED Platinum office buildings and another that is under construction and slated for completion in the quarter of 2020.

Buying from Hines

The Summit I & II. Image courtesy of Hines

The Bellevue office complex includes The Summit I, an 11-story, 240,898-square-foot property completed in 2002 at 355 110^th Ave. NE; and The Summit II, an adjacent 13-story, 283,232-square-foot building completed in 2005 and located at 10885 NE 4^th St.

Hines purchased the pair of properties from Ivanhoé Cambridge for a total of $296.8 million in 2015. The developer broke ground on a new addition, Summit III, in mid-2019.

According to an account in the Puget Sound Business Journal, Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon confirmed that it has preleased more than 300,000 square feet of the upcoming 374,220-square-foot property. Summit III is located at 320 108^th Ave. NE, directly to the west of Summit II.

KKR has invested or committed about $9 billion in capital via 200 real estate deals globally since launching a dedicated property platform in 2011. The NYSE-listed alternative investment firm bought a majority stake in Atlanta’s Salesforce Tower, a 631,808-square-foot Class A office property in the Buckhead submarket, for $205 million in August.