Exclusive: Pearl District office sale yields a record price

Earlier this summer, the 1320 Broadway Building in downtown Portland sold for $95 million, an eyebrow-raising price that, at $541 per square foot, set a new record for an office sale in the Rose City.

But interest in the Portland market isn’t cooling at all, and not long after 1320 sold, LaSalle Investment Management bought the new Pearl West office building in the Pearl District. And the price the investment firm paid for it has set a new high-water mark.

According to Multnomah County property records, LaSalle and an entity called LPF Pearl West LLC paid $87.5 million for the nine-story building, which sits at 1455 N.W. Irving St. The building’s roughly 155,500 square feet of rentable space pencils out to $562.83 per square foot.

On a per-square-foot basis, that’s the most that anyone has ever paid for an office building in Portland, though prices have been climbing in the past few years.

In 2015, TPF Equity Trust REIT paid $372.5 million for a majority stake in the U.S. Bancorp Tower. That worked out to about $338 per square foot. The 30-story Pacwest Center sold last December for $170 million — about $311 per square foot — and back in late 2014, the $31 million sale of the Overton Pearlcame to about $500 per square foot.

Developed by Walter Bowen’s BPM Real Estate Group, Pearl West was among the first new office buildings to break ground after the recession. It is now home to anchor tenant Wacom, Zoom +, United Fund AdvisorsHoward S. WrightRegus and First American Title Insurance Company.

BPM is also the developer behind Broadway Tower, a 19-story building under construction at Southwest Broadway and Southwest Columbia that will be home to a Radisson RED Hotel and 175,000 square feet of office space.