Historic Richmond Office Building Sells for $30M

The Edgeworth Building in Richmond, Va. Image courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield

The nearly century-old Edgeworth Building in Richmond, Va., has been sold for $29.5 million, or $210 per square foot. Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer’s Capital Markets Group represented the seller. The buyer was a family office based in New York City.

The property was originally built as a tobacco factory in 1925 but was redeveloped in 2007 into a creative-style office building with panoramic views of the James River. It was later awarded the Adaptive Reuse Project of the Year by the Greater Richmond Association of Commercial Real Estate.

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Located along historic Tobacco Row at 2100 E. Cary St., the Edgeworth Building totals 140,573 square feet and features oversized windows and high ceilings. At the time of sale, the asset was 95 percent leased to a diverse tenant base that includes legal, engineering, accounting and architecture firms such as Hirschler Fleischer, RK&K, Ernst & Young and HKS Architects.

The sale spotlights some of Richmond’s unique strengths as an office market, Eric Robison, executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer, said in a prepared statement. “Since the pandemic, Richmond’s office properties have performed more favorably than those in peer cities like Raleigh, Charlotte and Nashville. Richmond has regained nearly 60 percent of the initial job losses caused by COVID-19, and office space put on the market for sublease has stayed relatively steady, totaling only 1.3 percent of market availabilities.”

Richmond has benefitted both from a diverse economy and employment base and from “a lack of overbuilding office space specifically, which has kept vacancy rates low and enabled owners to push rental rates prior to the pandemic,” Robison told Commercial Property Executive.

Eclectic activity

Last April, Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer brokered the sale of a 123,400-square-foot office building in Suffolk, Va. The property is part of Bridgeway Commerce Park, a 400-acre master-planned development.

Two months later, the company represented Norfolk Southern in the sale of its headquarters, a 310,700-square-foot office tower in Norfolk, Va. Norfolk Southern is in the process of moving to a new 750,000-square-foot HQ in Atlanta.

And just a couple of weeks ago, Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer represented Carnegie Management and Development Corp. in its purchase of a nearly 50-acre site in Spotsylvania, Va. Carnegie plans to begin construction there soon on a 450,000-square-foot outpatient clinic for the Department of Veterans Affairs.