Westinghouse Campus in Pittsburgh Reels In $180M

Westinghouse campus. Image courtesy of Columbia Property Trust

Columbia Property Trust has completed the $180 million sale of a sprawling, Class A office campus in suburban Pittsburgh that is home to Westinghouse Electric Co. The announcement comes after the NYSE-listed REIT revealed it had struck a deal to sell the 824,000-square-foot headquarters campus to an undisclosed buyer in December.

Sited at 1000 Westinghouse Drive in Cranberry Township, Pa., the headquarters campus is part of the larger Cranberry Woods Office Park, a 327-acre master-planned business address just off the Route 228 interchange of Interstate 79, about 20 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh. The Westinghouse campus, developed in 2009 and 2010, consists of a five-story building connected to a pair of four-story buildings.

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Nuclear technology supplier Westinghouse moved to the complex from its old headquarters in Monroeville, Pa., from 2009 to 2012, fully leasing out the campus. Columbia scored a 15-year renewal of Westinghouse’s lease in 2017. Brookfield Business Partners LP completed a $4.6 billion acquisition of Westinghouse in August 2018, after the latter filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection the previous year.

Columbia signaled its intention to sell the asset in October 2018 and was reported by the Pittsburgh Business Times to have hired HFF, since acquired by JLL, to market the campus in January of last year.

Corporate hub in western Pennsylvania

Trammel Crow Co. partnered with Mine Safety Appliances to develop Cranberry Woods Office Park, which is located about 20 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh and also houses the headquarters of the safety product maker and other employers like NetApp, GAI Consultants and Genco, a division of FedEx Ground.

Standard building features of Cranberry Woods include two-story lobby atriums, 9-foot finished ceilings heights and parking ratios of at least 5 per 1,000 square feet. The project also offers two Marriott-branded hotels, a conference center and a 300-unit multifamily development, with a plethora of retail options in the vicinity.

Columbia, which had a total portfolio of 7.1 million square feet as of last September, has recently agreed to pay $239 million to acquire 201 California, a 272,000-square-foot Class A office tower in San Francisco. The deal followed Columbia’s exit from Atlanta through the sale of a roughly 700,000-square-foot office campus in a $227.5 million deal in April of last year.

Columbia disclosed in December that it had launched marketing efforts for Pasadena Corporate Park, a three-building, 262,000-square-foot office property in suburban Los Angeles.