July 27, 2015

Blackstone buys back buildings it sold 8 years ago

An entity related Blackstone Real Estate last week closed on numerous buildings in Redmond and Bothell it briefly owned eight years ago.

The DJC reported last week on the transactions, which total 20 office buildings with a combined purchase price of approximately $220 million, according to King County property records.

The transactions that closed last week may not include all the office buildings Blackstone is acquiring. Dan Harden, a Kidder Mathews broker who was not involved in the deal but has been tracking it, told the Puget Sound Business Journal that the Eastside portfolio totals 37 buildings with more than 2.3 million square feet of space.

The purchases are part of a larger deal Blackstone and Wells Fargo made early this year with GE Capital Real Estate, the parent company of the seller of the Redmond and Bothell buildings, Arden Realty. Blackstone and Wells Fargo announced in April they had agreed to buy most of GE Capital's real estate assets for approximately $23 billion. As part of the deal, a Blackstone fund agreed to pay $3.3 billion for GE Capital's U.S. assets, which are mostly in the Puget Sound region, Southern California and Washington D.C., according to a Blackstone press release at the time of the deal.

Blackstone representatives were not available for comment last week.

In 2006, Blackstone bought CarrAmerica, then the owner of the Redmond and Bothell buildings, for $5.6 billion. In 2007, Blackstone sold Arden a portfolio of 106 office buildings it got in the CarrAmerica deal. Those buildings totaled 5.9 million square feet of space in the Puget Sound region, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Portland and Salt Lake City. That portfolio included many of the buildings that Blackstone purchased from Arden last week.