Blackstone REIT lends $211m on US office portfolio

Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT) has provided a $210.7m floating-rate loan to Banyan Street Capital and Oaktree Capital Management for the acquisition of a 19-building suburban office building portfolio located across six US states.

The loan helps to fund the $237m acquisition as well as additional capital expenditures and leasing costs associated with the properties.

The seller, Parkway Properties, purchased the original 22 property, 3.1 m sq foot portfolio, located in Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia, for $475m, immediately flipping 19 of the buildings to the Banyan and Oaktree affiliates.

Parkway retained three of the Florida assets – Corporate Center I, II and III at International Plaza, located in the Westshore submarket of Tampa, Florida — for a gross purchase price of $238m. The three premier buildings in the lot represent about one-million-sq-ft of the total square footage, and Parkway stated that the remaining 19 properties were not “consistent with [its] current investment strategy.”

But HFF senior managing director Hermen Rodriguez, part of the team that led the sale, noted that those 19 properties “represent some of the top buildings in their individual submarkets, and as such were very attractive to investors.”

“Suburban office space is definitely of far greater interest to investors as the market recovery takes place,” he told Real Estate Capital. 

BXMT, a real estate investment trust traded on the New York Stock Exchange, is externally managed by BXMT Advisors, a subsidiary of Blackstone.