Brookfield Buys Seattle Campus for $200M

Block 24 within the Spring District. Image via Google Street View.

Brookfield Asset Management has purchased a second building in The Spring District development, in Bellevue, Wash., through one of its real estate funds. Advised by J.P. Morgan Global Alternatives, a joint venture of Wright Runstad & Co. and Shorenstein Properties, the developers of Spring District, sold the Facebook-leased Block 24 property for $200 million.

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Block 24 broke ground in 2019 and was recently completed. According to CommercialEdge data, the building received a $95 million construction loan, provided in 2019 by Wells Fargo Bank.

The nine-story, 197,959-square-foot property is located at 12355 N.E. District Way, within the 36-acre district. Floorplates average around 18,800 square feet, and the building also includes 1,190 square feet of ground-floor retail. Block 24 is currently pursuing LEED certification.

In October last year, Brookfield also acquired the 11-story Block 16 for $365 million, which is also leased to Facebook. The tech giant owns one of the buildings within the development, which it acquired last year for $367 million from REI.

The Spring District is a transit-oriented development comprising retail, hotel, office, and apartment buildings in various stages of development. The project already comprises more than 1 million square feet of office and retail space, as well as around 800 units. More than 350,000 square feet of office and retail space are under construction within the project, and more than 1 million square feet are in the planning phases.

The development is in the Bel-Red area, about 2 miles northeast of Bellevue’s CBD, near Interstate 405. The East Link Extension is an upcoming 40-mile light rail line that will include a station within Spring District and is expected to come online in 2023.

According to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report, the Puget Sound-Eastside market had around 3.3 million square feet of office space under development as of the first quarter of 2021, approximately 93 percent of which were within the Bellevue CBD area.