Clarion Partners on Monday bought another large Puget Sound area real estate asset, paying $157.85 million for Tableau Software’s headquarters, according to a deed that King County recorded.
New York City-based Clarion acquired the four-story building called NorthEdge from the companies that developed the building – Touchstone of Seattle and AIG Global Investment Group of New York – on the site of King County Metro’s former bus stop maintenance shop. The office building is in the Wallingford neighborhood, just north of Gas Works Park.
Earlier this year, Tableau moved around 1,000 employees into NorthEdge where the data-visualization company said it had space for more than 200 additional people.
Designed by the Seattle office of Perkins + Will, the building seems to slide snuggly into the sloping site and is organized around an outdoor central court made up of small roof terraces and walkways that step down the property to the lake. NorthEdge, which has dead-on views of the downtown skyline across Lake Union, won an AIA (American Institute of Architects) award in the Innovative Workplace Environment Inspired by Context category.
The sale is not unexpected because developers often sell new buildings they have leased up. In addition, Touchstone founder Douglas Howe and co-owners Jim O’Hanlon and Shawn Parry sold the company in late 2014 to Urban Renaissance Group of Seattle. They said they would work as advisers to URG for about three years until construction of their developments was done.
For companies like Clarion, which buys assets on behalf of institutional investors, properties like NorthEdge offer steady income streams.
Tableau inked an 11-year lease with Touchstone, with annual base rent starting at $35 a square foot and escalating annual to just over $47 a foot, according to terms spelled out in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. In addition, Tableau pays building operating expenses. The lease gives Tableau options for two seven-year extensions.
Clarion, which has a Seattle office, has been buying up properties in the Puget Sound region. Among the properties it owns or co-owns are a new, high-end apartment building in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, the downtown Seattle retail/entertainment complex that houses Niketown, the 1201 Third Avenue office tower in Seattle and a large Tukwila business park. Clarion paid a total of around $1.1 billion for these assets and NorthEdge. Clarion also co-developed a large distribution center for Amazon.com Inc. in Kent.
Marc Stiles covers real estate for the Puget Sound Business Journal.
