Tuft & Needle’s Phoenix HQ Trades for $9M

By Tudor Scolca

The Tuft & Needle headquarters building

Retail Realty Fund has acquired the Tuft & Needle headquarters and showroom building in downtown Phoenix for $8.7 million. A Lee & Associates team represented the seller in the transaction, an entity controlled by SimonCRE. Property Group International worked on behalf of the buyer.

Located at 735 Grand Ave., within the city’s central business district, the 36,000-square-foot historic property changed owners and tenants several times since its construction in 1917. The building achieved its iconic status when it operated as the O.S. Stapley Co. hardware store, which supplied materials to the Theodore Roosevelt Dam site. The shop closed in 1962, but its new owners used it as an appliance store and subsequently a car and industrial machinery repair shop.

Reinventing the look

SimonCRE acquired the then-vacant property in 2012 for $3.2 million, according to The Arizona Republic. The company saw an adaptive reuse opportunity, renovating it into creative office space and showroom for the headquarters of Tuft & Needle. Actually, the whole downtown Phoenix is experiencing a revitalization process, with more than $5 billion of public and private capital invested between 2004 and 2017, according to Lee & Associates Arizona.

“The Tuft & Needle building was attractive to the investor because of the quality adaptive reuse renovation by SimonCRE, the stability of a long-term lease to a nationally recognized tenant and the location in the heart of the vibrant downtown Phoenix redevelopment area,” said Jan Fincham, principal at Lee & Associates Arizona, in a prepared statement.

Fincham and Principal Patrick Dempsey were part of the Lee & Associates Arizona team that brokered this transaction.

Image courtesy of Lee & Associates