The buyers, two New York-based investors that have already spent more than $1 billion on property locally in the past year, remain bullish on the local real-estate scene.
It’s not just homes that are getting more expensive in the King County real-estate market: A new office building in downtown Bellevue that’s fully occupied by Amazon has sold for $313 million, the priciest property sale on the Eastside in five years.
The sellers of Centre 425, Bellevue-based developer Schnitzer West, said the transaction also set a record for a Bellevue commercial-property sale on a price-per-square-foot basis: $877 per rentable square foot.
Five years ago, the Eastside record was $655 per square foot, set with the sale of a Microsoft-leased building in downtown Bellevue for $374.65 million — similar to what Amazon paid for some of its South Lake Union buildings at the time.
The 16-story Centre 425, at 106th Avenue Northeast and Northeast Fourth Street, was completed last year. Amazon agreed a year ago to lease the entire office space totaling 360,000 square feet, a major expansion across the lake into Bellevue, where Jeff Bezos founded the company in a garage. The building has room for more than 2,200 workers.
The deal closed Wednesday. The buyers are Tristar Capital and RFR Holding — two New York-based investment companies that have been scooping up properties across the region recently.
The partners have now paid more than $1 billion to buy four office buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet in the last year, including two other Amazon offices in South Lake Union. The companies said in a statement that they expect the strong local tech scene to continue to prop up commercial and residential real-estate values locally.
Schnitzer presumably made a healthy profit off the Bellevue sale. It bought the site for just $12 million in December 2013 before spending untold millions to redevelop it.