Ashkenazy Makes Regional Debut With $79M Bellevue Retail Buy

By Alex Girda, Associate Editor

Making its Pacific Northwest debut, Ashkenazy Investment Corp. has paid $79 million for the retail portion of the Bravern, the 1.6 million-square-foot Bellevue mixed-use complex. Ashkenazy, whose portfolio includes high-profile properties like Union Station in Washington, D.C. and Boston’s Fanueil Hall Marketplace, beat out at least a dozen other prospective buyers to acquire The Shops at Bravern from a joint venture of Investcorp and Schnitzer West L.L.C.

The new owners say that recruiting tenants tops their agenda for the 309,000-square-foot lifestyle center. At the time the deal closed, the Shops at the Bravern was 87 percent leased and had 13 available spaces, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. Ashkenazy and Schnitzer West, which will stay on to manage the property, are counting on a 125,000-square-foot Nieman Marcus store—the luxury retailer’s first in the Pacific Northwest—to draw additional upscale retailers.

CBRE Group Inc.’s Kevin Shannon, Phil Voorhees and Ken White arranged the sale of the center, which is the second component of the Bravern to trade since the complex’s opening three years ago. In Sept. 2010, Principal Real Estate Investors paid $410 million for Bravern Office Commons, which consists of a 500,000-square-foot and a 250,000-square-foot building that are both leased by Microsoft Corp.

As for the complex’s multi-family component, Bravern Signature Residences, the ownership has no immediate plans to actively market the two-tower, 447-unit asset, Dan Ivanoff, Schnitzer West’s managing investment partner, told the Business Journal. In the year and a half prior to selling the Shops at Bravern, Schnitzer West had sold $1.3 billion worth of assets, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reported.