A smaller Palo Alto office building sold Thursday for $58 million, or a whopping $1,933 a square foot.
The purchaser — The Douglas Living Trust — bought the Park Boulevard structure from real estate investment firm Kenson Ventures LLC, according to documents filed with the Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder’s Office. The trust paid what’s believed to be a benchmark per-foot price for a property that’s not located in the city’s downtown.
The high sale price came despite the fact that the entire building is available for sublease, according to a listing by Savills on real estate listing site LoopNet.
Loeb & Loeb LLP partner Alison S. Telleen, who represented the trust, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives of Palo Alto-based Kenson declined to comment on the transaction.
The trust is likely a stand-in for a venture or private-equity firm that intends to occupy the building itself, according to multiple commercial real estate sources with knowledge of — but not direct involvement in — the deal.
Completed in late 2018 and located at 2555 Park Blvd., just blocks away from the California Avenue Caltrain station, the three-story Class A office building was leased in early 2019 to Tinder, the mobile dating app maker. After that deal was cancelled, SoftBank Group-Corp.-based startup Globality Inc. leased the buildling later that year.
Kenson bought the then-undeveloped 0.33-acre site from Menlo Park-based Tarlton Properties in 2016 for $12.4 million. Tarlton at the time had already secured the rights to build the office structure.
To get the building off the ground, Kenson brought on local developer The Minkoff Group and architecture firm Brick. Around the same time, Minkoff and Brick also built a three-story building nearby at 385 Sherman Ave., which Minkoff leased to Visa Inc. company. That structure sold for $138 million at a similarly eyebrow-raising per-square-foot price of more than $2,000 in 2018.
