Griffin Closes Nashville’s Top 2017 Office Deal

By Gail Kalinoski

One Century Place

In the largest office transaction this year in Nashville, Tenn., One Century Place, an eight-story, 538,790-square-foot, Class A office building, changed hands for $100 million. Griffin Capital Co. sold the asset to an entity owned by Syed Shamim of Bahrain.

Transwestern, which expanded into Nashville during the summer, will continue as manager for the property at 26 Century Blvd. The firm had been retained in July by Griffin Capital. At the time, Transwestern also announced it was building a team in Nashville to handle the property and meet the growing demand for real estate advisory services in the market.

The purchase of One Century Place by SCUS OCP LLC, the entity owned by Shamim, is a sign of how hot the Nashville market is.

Griffin Capital paid $70 million for the building in November 2013, when it acquired the asset from Columbia Property Trust as part of a 19-property portfolio transaction, according to Yardi Matrix. In addition to the Nashville site, that deal comprised nearly 4 million square feet of office properties in the Atlanta, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dallas-Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis and New Jersey markets.

In its third-quarter earnings release earlier this month, Griffin Capital Essential Asset REIT, Inc., noted the carrying value of One Century Place on the closing date was approximately $67.9 million.

Yardi Matrix reports Shamim received a $66.3 million loan from Barclays that will expire in November 2027 to fund the deal for One Century Place.

The property, located near the Nashville International Airport, has a full-service, upscale cafeteria and 37,000-square-foot conference facility. Major tenants include insurance brokerage Willis North America; Sodexo, a food and facilities management company; Asurion, a global technology support and protection company; alternative fuel manufacturer Cummins; and Kimberly Clark, the multinational consumer products corporation.

Transwestern team

Transwestern Senior Property Manager Amber Pfeiffer will lead the management team.

“We are excited to work with the new ownership to drive value for One Century Place, a highly sought-after location for gold-standard tenants,” Bruce Ford, Southeast President of Transwestern, said in a prepared statement. “With one of the most stable local economies in the country with a 2.3 percent unemployment rate—half that of the national average—Nashville has grown into a prominent business market.”

The Nashville sale wasn’t Griffin Capital’s only major recent disposition. The El Segundo, Calif.-based REIT last week announced the sale of DreamWorks Headquarters and Studio Campus, a five-building, 460,000-square-foot office property in Glendale, Calif., to LA Hana OW LLC, an entity of South Korean-based Hana Asset Management and Ocean West of Los Angeles, for $290 million. Proceeds from that sale will be used by Griffin Capital to execute of series of 1031 exchanges.

Image courtesy of Transwestern