Micros Systems Acquires 248 KSF Class A Office Building in Columbia, Md.

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

There’s no place like home, so Micros Systems Inc. decided to stay put and acquire its headquarters building at 7031 Columbia Gateway Drive in Columbia, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C.  The company, a provider of information technology solutions for the hospitality and retail industries, recently purchased the 247,700-square-foot asset from Columbia Property Trust Inc. for $59.5 million in cash.

Commercial real estate services firm Cassidy Turley represented Columbia Property Trust in the transaction, while CBRE Inc. stood in for Micros.

Sited on 14.5  acres in Columbia Gateway Business Park, 7031 Columbia last changed hands in 2007, when Wells Real Estate Investment Trust II Inc.–which became Columbia Property Trust in 2013–acquired the office facility for approximately $62.1 million.

Micros, whose lease of the entire building was scheduled to expire in February 2016, has called 7031 Columbia home since 1998. With the purchase of the property, Micros also becomes a landlord, at least temporarily, as the software maker has been subleasing roughly 39,500 square feet of the structure’s office space to Motorola Inc. under an agreement that expires in March 2015.

It’s nice to have a home of one’s own, and Micros will have to maintain ownership of 7031 Columbia for at least three years unless, per terms of the purchase deal, it wants to fork over 50 percent of the net profit of any sale of the property to Columbia Property Trust.

Micros’s closing of the acquisition of 7031 Columbia comes on the heels of an announcement that Oracle has entered into an agreement to buy Micros for $5.3 billion.

For Columbia Property Trust’s part, the 7031 Columbia transaction is about repositioning. The REIT also recently sold the 128,300-square-foot SunTrust Building in Orlando, Fla., as well as the 240,300-square-foot office property at 160 Park Avenue in Florham Park, N.J., which, like 7031 Columbia, was sold to the occupier.

“Consistent with our previous asset recycling activity, these transactions continue to improve the overall performance and quality of our portfolio by reducing our exposure to single-tenant and suburban assets and tightening our market concentration,” Nelson Mills, president & CEO of Columbia Property Trust noted in a prepared statement.