Saxum Buys Tampa’s Largest Office Property

July 9, 2024

Investment Featured News OfficeMoreSoutheast Tampa

This transaction also marks the company’s first acquisition in the market.

Saxum Real Estate Partners, a New Jersey–based private real estate investment company, has made a splash with their first purchase in the Tampa Bay market, acquiring NetPark Tampa Bay, a 947,176-square-foot, two-story office complex.

Aerial view of NetPark Tampa Bay at 5701 E. Hillsborough Ave. *Image courtesy of CBRE*

CBRE represented the seller, Bluett Capital Realty Inc., of Sacramento, Calif., and their tenants-in-common ownership group. The purchase price was $45 million, according to CommercialEdge data.

CBRE reported that the deal not only involved the Tampa market’s largest office property, but that this was the biggest office asset sold in the whole Southeast since 2022.

NetPark Tampa Bay is at 5701 E. Hillsborough Ave., on a 98.7-acre site in the East Tampa/I-75 Corridor submarket. The property’s on-site amenities include a fitness facility, dining hall, conference center and auditorium, on-site day care facility and a HART bus transfer station.

The property is 60 percent occupied by a diverse tenant roster including a variety of public and private-sector firms, in spaces ranging from 1,250 to nearly 150,000 square feet.

Formerly known as East Lake Square Mall, the property was Tampa’s original regional mall when developed in 1976, according to CBRE.

Dale Peterson, Joe Chick and Courtney Snell with CBRE Capital Markets represented the seller.

Warm to cold

The metro Tampa, Fla., office market is seeing limited overall absorption so far this year. That’s in part because of a handful of major corporate relocations, according to a first-quarter report from JLL. Despite this, the report states, “many large deals have been inked throughout the past six months, signaling the continued need for large blocks of space.”

Overall office vacancy across the metro is 17.2 percent, about where it has stayed for two-plus years. Approximately 430,000 square feet of space is under construction, about three-quarters of it preleased.

In contrast to subtropical Tampa, some of Saxum’s recent moves have been in the cold storage sector. Last December, the company, with its equity capital partner BGO, completed the recapitalization of an approximately 1.5 million-square-foot cold storage portfolio. The six recently delivered properties are in Phoenix; Atlanta; Dallas–Fort Worth; Hazleton, Pa.; and Reno, Nev.

And in April, Saxum and Arcadia Cold Storage & Logistics announced plans to build two cold storage facilities in the Chicago metro, with one of them to begin construction by the end of this year.