Emmett Completes Purchase of High-Rise
Douglas Emmett Realty Advisors has closed its purchase of downtown Santa Monica’s 100 Wilshire luxury office building. The institutional investment advisor paid approximately $87 million for the 21-story landmark, which features 245,413 square feet of office space overlooking the beach at Wilshire Boulevard and Ocean Avenue.
The tower, Santa Monica’s tallest building, boasts some of Southern California’s steepest office rents, ranging up to $4.50 per square foot per month.
Brentwood-based Douglas Emmett also acquired an adjacent parcel of land from the same seller--an affiliate of Japan’s Asahi Urban Development--for about $5 million. Cushman & Wakefield brokered the sale on behalf of Asahi Urban and its asset manager, AMB Property Corp., while Kennedy-Wilson represented Douglas Emmett.
The new owner hasn’t finalized plans for the vacant land, which has city approvals for office development, said market observer Howard Sadowsky, vice chairman of national commercial property brokerage Julien J. Studley Inc. He added that zoning restrictions make the tower an “irreplaceable” asset.
Douglas Emmett, which owns and operates income properties on behalf of investors, already owns Santa Monica’s second-tallest office building, the 12-story 401 Wilshire, and at least three others in the downtown district.
Asahi Urban reportedly paid $73 million for 100 Wilshire, the renovated former headquarters of GTE California, near the peak of the last Southern California economic and real estate cycle in 1987. Hence, the sale at $87 million, or about $355 per rentable square foot, represents a rare instance in which a Japanese buyer active in the 1980s made a substantial profit selling a large California commercial property.
