Invesco Snaps Up 1218 Third Avenue; Bullit Center Pushes the Green Envelope

By Alex Girda, Associate Editor

 “An office deal a week” seems to be Seattle’s new mantra these days as investment sales get in gear for autumn. The most recent property to take the spotlight is the 82-year-old Art Deco landmark located at 1218 Third Avenue, which Invesco Realty Advisors has just acquired in a $30.45 million transaction. Coming under new ownership has become practically routine for the 27-story office tower; as the Puget Sound Business Journal pointed out, the property has traded four times in the past seven years alone. According to web source OfficeSpace.com, all but 26,077 square feet of the building’s total 169,883-square-foot space are occupied.

Besides hosting a busy office transaction market, Seattle is keeping up its reputation as a leader in sustainability. The Bullit Foundation, a locally based environmental group, broke ground last week on a 45,000-square-foot office building that the organization is billing as an avant-garde green model. When completed in late 2012, the six-story Bullit Center will consume only one-third as much energy as a conventional office building, process its own wastewater and—if city officials approve—even produce its own water supplies from rainwater runoff captured by the billing, the Seattle Times reported.

Standards for the building’s materials will be similarly strict. All construction materials must be produced within a 300-mile radius of the site in order to trim the project’s carbon footprint.  Only timber harvested from certified sustainable locations will be used, and more than 300 substances deemed to be hazardous are restricted. At $30 million, the project’s development costs reflect a considerable premium for office projects of its size. But Bullit Foundation’s president & CEO, Denis Hayes, told the Times that the building’s state-of-the-art green features will help offset  the premium by enhancing the building’s appeal to tenants and lowering operation costs.