SANTA ROSA -- A San Francisco-based real estate investor and developer recently acquired a five-building, 70,000-square-foot office complex in southwest Santa Rosa that had been part of a large North Bay commercial property portfolio until foreclosure last year.
Presidio Development Partners LLC, acting as Parkpoint M&C Investors LLC, acquired Parkpoint Business Center on Dec. 13 from loan servicer CW Capital, which foreclosed in June.
The just under $4 million purchase price for the 60 percent-occupied office complex, located at the northwest corner of North Dutton and West College avenues, amounted to about a 7.5 percent capitalization rate, according to Presidio partner Cliff Miller. The firm plans to spend about $2 million on landscaping, sidewalks, new signage and other minor minor exterior upgrades as well as interior improvements.
"This is a great office property that has performed well over the years and only recently lost occupancy due to the prior owner’s high cost basis," Mr. Miller said. "We now have the ability lease or sell these small buildings at compelling prices."
Asking prices are in the range of $1.55 to $1.70 a square foot on a full-service basis. A 10,000-square-foot building that has housed shuttered restaurants Mistral and Sassafras is being offered at around $110 a square foot.
A Fitch Ratings report in March on the commercial mortgage-backed security with which Parkpoint was packaged said that the property was 64 percent occupied, with rent payments covering only covering 82 percent of the loan costs. Wells Fargo Bank transferred the property to special servicing in September 2009.
Equity Office Properties, now part of The Blackstone Group, acquired Parkpoint from Bedford Property Investors in 2005. The same year Equity Office purchased 44 office buildings in Sonoma and Marin counties from Basin Street Properties for $263 million.
More than a dozen of those buildings in Petaluma and Santa Rosa have returned to lenders or been sold in the past year.
Presidio Development Partners has been looking for North Bay properties since the economic recession reset prices, according to Mr. Miller, a Marin County resident. The firm unsuccessfully bid on five buildings Cisco Systems sold in late 2009 to Cornerstone Properties and also on property Medtronic had briefly put on the market in the Fountaingrove area of northeast Santa Rosa.
"My partner and I for the last several years were priced out of the market, as high as things got in the run-up," Mr. Miller said. "We stepped back and did consulting work and worked out problems with existing projects."
Currently, Presidio has two other projects under way, including The Versailles, a 60-unit San Mateo senior condominium project that had been foreclosed, and an industrial buidling in Milpitas that had been rezoned for housing.
Commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield brokered the latest Parkpoint sale.
